Past Newsletters

No. 510 SEPTEMBER 2013 Edited by Graham Javes

HADAS DIARY

A proposed visit to Portsmouth Dockyard. Your response is needed. SEE BACK PAGE.

Tuesday 8th October, 8pm Brunel’s Tunnel under the Thames. The first tunnel under a river anywhere in the world, built by Sir Marc Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel (then only 19 years old). A lecture by Robert Hulse, Director of the Brunel Museum.

Tuesday 12th November, 8pm The Lions on Kunulua: excavations of the Early Bronze and Iron Age periods at Tell Tayinat, Hatay, Turkey. Lecture by Dr. Fiona Haughey.

Sunday 1st December, 12 noon – 4.30 pm (approx.) HADAS Christmas Party at Avenue House. Buffet lunch. Price £25 to include one drink. Cash bar. Booking details coming soon.

Lectures are held at Avenue House, 17 East End Road, Finchley N3 3QE, starting at 8pm prompt, with tea/coffee and biscuits afterwards. Non-members are welcome (£1.00). Buses 82, 125, 143, 326 and 460 pass nearby. Finchley Central Station (Northern Line) is a short walk away.

Finds in Focus, 2013-2014

During the academic year 2013/2014 HADAS will again run the course Finds in Focus. This will concentrate on post-excavation analysis, and be tutored by Jacqui Pearce BA, FSA, MIfA. It will be held on Wednesday evenings, 6.30–8.30pm at Avenue House, (address above). There will be 22 sessions starting on 2nd October, 2013. The cost of the course will be covered by a donation to HADAS of £275.

The aim of this award-winning course is to provide tuition in identifying, recording and understanding different classes of finds from archaeological excavations. Using material from sites in the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC) that were never fully written up, the intention is to bring them to publication through various means. This year we will be continuing work on sites excavated by the Guildhall Museum in the early years after the Second World War, through a combination of practical sessions and tuition. By examining a wide range of finds, from pottery to clay pipes, glass and building material, we hope to learn more about the people who used them and the world in which they lived.

HADAS and cricket bats in East Finchley Stewart Wild

What is the connection between HADAS and cricket bats? No, this isn’t a question from Victoria Coren’s baffling puzzle quiz Only Connect on BBC4. It started at the end of July when I called in to see Chairman Don, Jim and Bill who were working on a HADAS excavation of the old air-raid shelters at Martin School in East Finchley.

I mentioned I had reached the school on the High Road by driving down Church Lane from East End Road. Don observed that I had therefore passed Hobbs Green and Cricket Row. “What?” I said, never having heard of either. I knew the first turning on Church Lane named Elm Gardens (a friend once lived there), but the other names were new to me. How come I had not noticed them before?

On the way home, I went back down Church Lane to look more closely. Hobbs Green comprises a short cul-de-sac of new and old houses; a pair of new houses bears the name “Wickett’s & Ashes Lodge” (sic). Cricket Row is just that, a terraced row of six new houses in Church Lane with a very small nameplate that is easy to miss. I felt better.

Don said that the names related to a cricket bat factory that used to be in the area. What? How come I’d never heard of that either? I had to get to deep extra cover on this one; Google helped. It turns out that some of the Hobbs Green houses and garages were indeed built on the site of a cricket bat factory owned by Summers Brown & Sons Ltd. The factory seems to have been built around 1911 on the site of a house named Glencroft, dating from around 1830 and shown on the 1894 OS map.

The name of the little road honours the legendary cricketer, Sir Jack Hobbs (1882–1963) who used cricket bats made by Summers Brown. In 1908 Summers Brown filed a patent for a device to act as a shock absorber in the cricket bat handle. The patent involved taking a solid cane handle and making saw cuts in it. Then flaps of rubber were inserted and interweaved to make the handle flexible. What Jack Hobbs made of it isn’t recorded, but I remember from my schooldays using a bat constructed in this way, so presumably Summers Brown’s idea made sense.

I could find no further mention of Glencroft in any local history publications, nor any more about the cricket bat factory. But I’m still looking, and if I find anything interesting, I’ll let you know. If readers have anything to add, do share.

There’s still something odd about the Jack Hobbs and Finchley connection. The great man was born in Cambridgeshire, played all his cricket for Surrey (and England), lived in south London and died in Sussex. His only connection with Middlesex seems to have been when he played at Lords!

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE AND NEW KINGDOMS OF ANCIENT EGYPT: a course arranged by the Mill Hill Archaeological Study Society.

We will investigate the development of one of the world’s oldest civilisations from the beginning of what is termed the classical period of Ancient Egypt – the Middle Kingdom – through the period of Empire – the New Kingdom. It is also the time when the state religion was swept away by the changes introduced by Akhenaten. We will examine these to determine if his Atenism was the world’s first monotheistic religion. We will study the single surviving intact pharonic tomb, that of Tutankhamun and review his role in the Amama period.

Venue: The Eversfield Centre, 11 Eversfield Gardens, Mill Hill, MW7 2AE
Time: 10:00 – 12:00 Fridays, beginning 4th October 2013
Tutor: Scott McCracken Cost: £140.00 for 20 classes

Enrol at the first meeting. If you have not previously attended the Society’s meetings, please contact the Secretary, Peter Nicholson, Tel: 020 8959 4757. http://www.mhass.co.uk

LONDON AND MIDDLESEX ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY:
LOCAL HISTORY CONFERENCE: THE RIVER AND PORT OF LONDON
Saturday 16 November 2013: 10am – 5pm. Weston Theatre, Museum of London.

Programme:

A changing port in a changing world. London’s harbours from the 1st to the 18th century, Gustav Milne, Director of the Thames Discovery Programme.

Re-invention and Change: the Port of London from 1790-1938, Chris Ellmers, Founding Director, Museum in Docklands.

Presentation of the LAMAS Publications Awards for 2013

Lunch (See below)

Local history and the environmental history of the Thames, 1960-2010, Vanessa Taylor, Research Fellow, Greenwich Maritime Institute.

‘Primus Omnium’, the world’s first modern police force. Robert Jeffries, Curator, Thames Police Museum.

Tea and biscuits (served in the Clore Education Centre and included in conference price)

The Thames as a provider of drinking water, Mark Jenner, University of York.

‘The Thames Beautiful’- the artist’s perspective, Mireille Galinou, Arts and Museums Consultant and former Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the Museum of London.

NB. Arrangements for Lunch. Refreshments may be purchased from the Museum’s restaurant and café, or bring your own. The Clore Education Centre’s lunch space, beside the local history displays, will be available for people to consume their own food and drink.

Tickets will be on sale from 1st September. Early-bird: £12, before 31 October; £15 from 1st November. Tickets can be obtained by post from Eleanor Stanier, LAMAS Local History Conference, 48 Coval Road, East Sheen, London, SW14 7RL, enclosing an SAE. or via the LAMAS website, paying by PayPal. Further details at www.lamas.org.uk/localhistory

The conference is expected to be a sell out and the last 20 tickets will be sold over the phone to avoid exceeding the capacity of the conference hall.
Support for the ambitious Build the Lenox project, Deptford Stewart Wild

On Sunday 21 July, I visited Brompton Cemetery on the occasion of its annual Open Day, primarily to visit the Catacombs which are only open on this one day each year. If you’ve never seen Victorian cemetery catacombs – there are similar loculi vaults at Kensal Green and West Norwood – they’re worth a visit.

It was a gloriously sunny day, and many other organisations had display stands, out to attract interest and donations. One such was for a new and rather ambitious project to build a replica of a seventeenth-century warship in its original shipyard and to promote Deptford as a site of world heritage. I met the mastermind behind the scheme, boat builder Julian Kingston, in period costume and accompanied by an impressive Saker naval cannon dating from around 1620.

In 1513 Henry VIII founded the Royal Naval Dockyard at Deptford, on the south bank of the Thames, where hundreds of warships and trading vessels were subsequently built. Five hundred years later the dockyard still exists – just, with many of its major features extant. Since 1984 it has been known as Convoys Wharf – Prince Street and Watergate Street form part of the boundary.

Since 2000, plans by Hutchison Whampoa to redevelop the area for mostly luxury residential use have met with much local protest. However there is considerable support for a new project to build a replica of the Lenox, the first warship to be constructed in the grand shipbuilding programme initiated by Charles II in 1677, managed by the diarist Samuel Pepys.

Inspiration has come from France where the replica of a famous French frigate, the Hermione, has reinvigorated the little town of Rochefort on the Atlantic coast near La Rochelle. The original Hermione was built in Rochefort in 1778 and played a major part as La Fayette’s flagship during the American War of Independence (we came third). The full-size replica, built in the very same shipyard from 1997–2012, has proved a major tourist attraction in western France.

Part of the Lenox proposals include restoration of Sayes Court Gardens, created by diarist John Evelyn in the 1670s, and which played a key role in the foundation of the National Trust. Following damage during WWII there is sadly little left today.

Julian Kingston realizes that this is a very long-term project, and will cost millions, but is encouraged both by local support, and from the Mayor of London and the developers, and by the success of the SS Great Britain project in Bristol. At my invitation, he has agreed to contribute to our HADAS lecture programme in 2015 or 2016, when plans for the Lenox will be rather more advanced.

The Convoys Wharf site will feature in Open House weekend 2013, on Saturday 21 September; further information is available on www.buildthelenox.org.

Good news from Chillingham, Northumberland Stewart Wild

It’s often said that newspapers rarely print good news but an encouraging item in the Daily Telegraph in July caught my eye.

Members who enjoyed the HADAS weekend trip to Northumbria in 2005 will remember that in addition to splendid visits to Berwick-upon-Tweed, Bamburgh Castle, Holy Island and Lindisfarne, we stopped at Chillingham, a village with a castle near Wooler in Northumberland. There we saw some of the very rare white cattle, members of an ancient breed that have lived totally wild on 650 acres of enclosed pasture and woodland for over 800 years. Our guide explained that their origins are mysterious, that there were only about fifty of them – that’s fifty in the whole world – and that they were clearly a threatened species.

But a decade ago, the Wild Cattle Association (nothing to do with me!), that owns the land where the animals roam, ended a lease that had allowed sheep to graze the same pasture. The result is that over recent years the cattle have had access to more food, and they’ve thrived on it. Milder weather in winter and spring has probably helped too. The good news is that there are now around one hundred of the beasts, but they’re still rarer than giant pandas! A Chillingham Wild Bull was featured on a Royal Mail 20½ pence stamp on 6 March 1984, part of a series of five issued to mark the centenary of the Highland Cattle Society.

South American Road Trip:
Part two – North out of Lima, along the Pacific coast. Tim Wilkins
North of Lima a series of small rivers run out of the Andes and down to the Pacific, and in most of these are archaeological sites of various pre-Inca civilisations. Two hours north of Lima is Caral, originally thought to date from around 2,500 BC, but ongoing work there is pushing this date further back. The present earliest dating is between 3,500 and 3,000 BC, so contemporaneous with some of the earliest sites in Egypt. Like Mexican pyramids, they built new larger ones over previous ones. The construction is of stone facing held together with mud but the infill is of river pebbles held in cotton net bags, which luckily can be carbon-dated, as the site is pre-ceramic and with no carvings or decoration extant. There are eight pyramids in the main complex, roughly in a circle, with circular sunken “amphitheatres” in front of two of them. They think the site was mainly ceremonial though there are a few domestic buildings with fire-pits used for cooking. The whole site felt a lot like Egypt with the monuments at the edge of the cultivation, on a desert platform at the confluence of two rivers, and with bare desert mountains all around (Picture 1). From the highest point it is possible to look out over the surrounding valley and see a further 19 other pyramid complexes, mostly hardly excavated.

A further 2½ hours north is the site of Chavin de Huantar. To get to the site there is a road up to a pass in the Cordillera Blanca range of the Andes with a narrow tunnel at 4,200 metres high. After that the road becomes a narrow dirt track that drops to 1800 metres in little over an hour and has everything you really don’t want; rocks and rockfalls, potholes, streams, cattle, goats, donkeys, chickens, buses and trucks, roadworks, the tightest hairpin bends ever, and sheer drops with a distinct lack of barriers. Until 20 years ago Chavin was thought to be the oldest civilisation in South America, dating from 1200 –800 BC, but more recent discoveries elsewhere have overtaken this. The site itself is quite small and not fully excavated but has some impressive features. Pyramid platforms surround a rectangular ceremonial area. There are also circular sunken spaces and incredibly complicated water channels used both to channel the many streams underneath the structures, and to create sound effects to accompany the rituals, usually involving hallucinogens from the San Pedro cactus. So when the priest called for a sign from the gods, the channels were opened and the earth itself rumbled and shook as the water rushed through. Inset in the outside walls are rows of carved heads showing the priest’s transformation from human to jaguar, snake or condor under the hallucinogenic influence. Most of these heads are now in the excellent new Chavin museum (Picture 2).

Back down on the coastal plain some 200 miles north of Lima is the site of Sechin, another very early site, thought to be from 1800–1200 BC. Being near the coast, it is mostly built with mud bricks rather than stone, but it is reasonably well preserved up to head height. It is quite a small site and you can’t go inside, only walk around the stone outer walls, which are covered with over 300 carvings of priests and warriors. They are mostly not intact people, rather, a wild selection of body parts, all at different orientations: here decapitated heads, there a pair of legs, but upside down; two otherwise unattached hands clasped in a handshake, and now a torso without limbs.

Around the city of Trujillo are a huge number of sites from the Moche and Chimu civilisations dating from 500 BC to AD 1500. Just outside Trujillo are the Moche mud-brick pyramids now known as the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, (also known as the Huacas de Sol y Luna – ‘Huaca’ being a religious site, usually a pyramid). The Pyramid of the Sun is the larger at 40 metres high, but it is not open to the public as it is unsafe – the conquistadors knew that the Moche buried their royals inside the pyramids along with hoards of gold, so they diverted a river to flow through the pyramid to get at the gold. The Pyramid of the Moon is smaller than that of the Sun, but is still huge – seven layered steps, each one with carved and painted friezes of warriors, captives, snakes, spiders, and creatures with reptile-bodies and feline heads. These have faded away on the outside, except on one face, but inside some spectacular images survive (Picture 3).

Just north of Trujillo are the Pyramid of the Dragon (the Dragon Huaca) and the Chimu site of Chan Chan. This pyramid is small, made of adobe mud-brick, and covered with carvings of human figures, rainbows and a snake or dragon. Sadly most of the carvings are modern reconstructions and it is impossible to distinguish which bits are original without being told. Chan Chan is the Chimu capital city, covering 20 sq. km., dating from AD 850 until the arrival of the Inca in about 1500. The city consists of ten walled citadels, each in itself a hugely impressive site, with monumental exterior walls, interior open spaces, and both religious and residential buildings. The walls are carved and decorated with iconography such as fish, pelicans and sea otters but, as with the pyramid, most of what is visible now is modern, again done in a way that makes it impossible to tell which are original and which are new.

60 Km north of Trujillo is the pyramid complex of El Brujo. This consists of three pyramids, pretty much right on the beach, another Moche site, dating from AD 200 – 650. The internal chambers are beautifully decorated with carvings and brightly coloured paintings of dancers, priests, catfish and other fish, and ‘The Decapitator’, a figure holding a knife and the head of a captive (Picture 4).

It was in one of these pyramids, the ‘Pyramid of Cao’, where in 2006 a spectacular burial chamber of a royal princess was discovered, with amazing artefacts, including stunning gold and copper headdresses, jewellery and pottery, along with the remains of female servants and a male warrior guard. This is very similar to a discovery announced just a few weeks ago at a site of the Wari culture near to Lima, where it seems that a succession of princesses were buried on successive levels of a pyramid, along with female servants and male guards. The finds from the ‘Lady of Cao’ burial are now on show at a very smart new museum.

We found that visiting all these sites had the potential to get very confused as to dates and civilisations, so we made this grid to help us through it all, showing a timeline, sites and civilisations.

In the next part: north again along the coast to Lambayeque, with sites dating from AD 500 –1000, a site from 3000 BC, or maybe older, then up into the Andes for a completely different set of sites.

What’s On in October. Eric Morgan
Thursday 3rd October, 8.00pm. Pinner LHS, Village Hall, Chapel Lane Car Park, Pinner. The Gruesome History of Bodysnatching, Robert Stephenson, (Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery).

Friday 4th Oct, 6.00pm. Geologist’s Association, Burlington House, Piccadilly, Confessions of a Flint Knapper, Prof. Phil Harding. Tea is served from 5.30pm. Wine and nibbles are available after meetings. Non-members are very welcome to attend for an introductory visit – please telephone (020 7434 9298) or email (sarah@geologistsassociation.org.uk) the Executive Secretary to book a place.

Thursday 10 October, 7.00pm. St Pancras Old Church, Pancras Rd, NW1. St Pancras Station, Simon Bradley. Admission £10, incl. wine with proceeds towards the church renovation.

Monday, 14th October, 3.00pm, Barnet Museum & Local History Society, Church House, Wood St, Barnet. 18th Century Remedies for Boils, Carbuncles and Warts, Carla Herrmann. Visitors £2.

Wednesday, 16th October, 7.30pm. Willesden Local History Society, St Mary’s Church Hall, Neasden Lane, NW10 2TS. Artists in Willesden, Margaret Pratt.

Wednesday, 16th October, 6.00pm. Gresham College, at the Museum of London. The Building of England: Retrospect and Prospect 410 AD to 2000, Simon Thurley (English Heritage). In this the final lecture in his series on the history of English building, Simon Thurley looks back. What can be concluded from a survey of 1,400 years of English architecture and social life? Free.

Wednesday, 16th October, 8.00pm. Edmonton Hundred Historical Society, Jubilee Hall, 2 Parsonage Lane, EN2 0AJ. Enfield Railways, Part 2 (West) Great Northern Line & Hertford Loop, Dave Cockle.

Friday, 18th October, 7.00pm, COLAS, St Olave’s Parish Hall, Mark Lane, EC3. Excavations in the Roman Town of Sandy, Catherine Edwards (AOC Archaeology). Visitors £2.

Friday, 18th October, 8.00pm, Enfield Archaeological Society, Jubilee Hall, (address as previous page) The Roman Bones of Old Enfield, Neil Pinchbeck. Visitors £1.

Wednesday, 23 October, 7.45pm, Friern Barnet & District LHS, St John’s Church Hall, Friern Barnet Lane (next to Whetstone Police Station). Friern Hospital, David Berguer. Visitors £2.

Thursday, 31 October, 8.00pm, Finchley Society, Drawing Room, Avenue House (address as previous page) A discussion. Visitors £2.

PROPOSED VISIT to PORTSMOUTH DOCKYARD Jim Nelhams

At the AGM there was a brief discussion about a possible outing to Portsmouth Dockyard to visit, among other things, the new Mary Rose display. The dockyard also contains the Victory and HMS Warrior, the first iron-clad, armoured warship, powered by steam and sail.

Depending on numbers, we are looking at a total cost of around £45, including £26 for group entrance to all three ships. The AGM agreed to look at a weekday, and we are considering some time in October.
Because of the high cost, we need to know that we have enough support before we book anything. Please let us know if you would like to come. Email, or phone Jim Nelhams or Don Cooper by 14th September.

No. 509 AUGUST 2013 Edited by Vicki Baldwin

HADAS DIARY

Lectures are held at Avenue House, 17 East End Road, Finchley N3 3QE, starting at 8pm, with tea/coffee and biscuits afterwards. Non-members are welcome (£1.00). Buses 82, 125, 143, 326 and 460 pass nearby. Finchley Central Station (Northern Line) is a short walk away.

Sunday 15th September to Thursday 19th September Buxton Trip. See February newsletter for details, or contact Jim & Jo Nelhams (020 8449 7076).

Tuesday 8th October, 8pm Brunel’s Tunnel under the Thames. The first tunnel under a river anywhere in the world, built by Sir Marc Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel (then only 19 years old). A lecture by Robert Hulse, Director of the Brunel Museum.

Tuesday 12th November, 8pm The Lions on Kunulua: excavations of the Early Bronze and Iron Age periods at Tell Tayinat, Hatay, Turkey. Lecture by Dr. Fiona Haughey.

Sunday 1st December, 12 noon – 4.30 pm (approx.) HADAS Christmas Party at Avenue House. Buffet lunch. Price £25 to include one drink. Cash bar. Booking details coming soon.

LAMAS Historic Buildings and Conservation Committee Peter Pickering

I am a member of the Historic Buildings and Conservation Committee of LAMAS. We are holding a conference on Saturday 28th September. This is a new venture – LAMAS has long held annual conferences on archaeology and on local history; but this is the first to deal specifically with the built heritage and the pressure it is under in the modern world where major redevelopment is seen as the way back to prosperity out of recession. There will be talks about historic buildings in the London area of all periods from Roman to the twentieth century, and three studies of very recent contentious cases (the Deptford Dockyard, the Middlesex Hospital site with the nearby workhouse which may or may not have been the model for the one in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and King’s Cross station). The conference will be in The Gallery, 75 Cowcross Street (very close to Farringdon Station), and the cost will be £30 including lunch and refreshments; that will give everybody an opportunity of talking informally with the speakers. Tickets can be obtained on the LAMAS website or from Richard Buchanan 79 Ashridge Crescent, Shooters Hill, London, SE18 3EA, cheques payable to LAMAS; please send a stamped addressed envelope or e-mail address for acknowledgement.

Bankside STEWards would like to invite you to join them at the Firing on the Foreshore event at the Thames Festival 14 September 2013

foreshore2007 080_edited

Come and join us on the river stairs in front of the Globe Theatre where there will be a display of Thames finds for you to look at from 12.30pm to 6pm. Hear the story of the witch bottles, the clay pipes, Bankside pottery and see what people ate in the past.

At 2pm, there will be an archaeological walk along the foreshore led by Dr Fiona Haughey

– discover 10,000 years of London’s history beneath your feet.

From 12.30pm until covered by the incoming tide, pots made from Thames river clay will be fired in a bonfire constructed on the foreshore from river driftwood – a technique used by Britain’s first potters in 4,000 BC.

THIS IS A FREE EVENT – NO NEED TO BOOK JUST TURN UP!!

Bankside STEWards are a network of local residents and business contacts committed to caring for and promoting the past, present and future of the archaeology and environment of the Thames foreshore between Blackfriars and London Bridges at Bankside. They are an Adopt-a-River group of Thames21.

Fiona is also looking for any volunteers to help on the day – she will be needing people from 11am to about 6pm but even an hour or two of their time would be most welcome!! In the past there have been in the region of 2000 visitors to the table and onto the foreshore. Fire Marshalls are needed on the foreshore, aid with those going down (a quick H&S briefing and signing a form), and help at the table. No previous knowledge/experience necessary – instructions will be given on the day, as well as access to crib sheets for those on the table – although the pottery experience of some HADAS members will be invaluable here!!!

It is great fun – the general public’s insatiable appetite for archaeology never ceases to amaze Fiona and they seem particularly proud of the ‘home-grown’ variety from the foreshore. Refreshments will be provided! We meet by The Globe stairs. This year the Thames Festival has finally decided to concentrate on the river rather than land-based activities. The Firing event has been always based on the river and the Festival are keen to have us (it only took a decade…..) so please come and help us spread the knowledge of all that can be found beneath your feet!!

Contact Fiona (see details below) with any queries and further details.

In addition, if you’d like to come and play with Thames clay to make the pots we fire on the foreshore, you’d be more than welcome! We are doing this on August 20th between 12.30pm-2.30pm on the Globe river stairs. The clay comes from the footings of the Millennium Bridge and also from Deptford Creek. No previous experience necessary!

Dr Fiona Haughey

Archaeologist & Archaeological Illustrator; Director Archaeology on the Thames Project

27 Spring Grove, Strand-on-the-Green, London W4 3NH Tel: 07957 742 789

fiona_haughey@yahoo.co.uk

Royal Archaeological Institute Visit to Germany Peter Pickering

I have just returned from a visit to Germany with the Royal Archaeological Institute. We were based in Frankfurt, and saw a wide variety of sites, from the prehistoric to a nineteenth century Prussian fort. The museums were beautifully presented and had large numbers of important and interesting objects on show; the labelling seemed informative, but did require better German than I possess (we usually had a guide, which greatly helped); apart from our group there were few people in them – what a contrast to the crowded museums of London! The most memorable site was the Glauberg, a Celtic/Iron Age hillfort where several princely graves were discovered in the 1990s; most amazing is a life-size statue of a man, perfectly preserved except for the feet, in armour and wearing jewellery, and on his head an asymmetrical headdress said to be mistletoe leaves.

Did you know….. Peter Pickering

….that Alexandra Palace was used during the First World War for the internment of German civilians who had been living in London, many with English wives and families? I did not until I heard a talk by Maggie Butt of Middlesex University, which she illustrated, movingly, with extracts from letters written by inmates, and with paintings by one of those internees.

South American Road Trip Tim Wilkinson

Over the past twenty years or so there have been a series of spectacular excavations in Northern Peru, including multi-level royal tombs, and pyramid complexes dating contemporaneously with the earliest pyramids in Egypt. These discoveries have greatly redefined thinking on pre-Inca civilisations in South America.

We decided that it would be fun to go and look at some of these and, while we were there, also take in Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador.

We started in Chile, which was interesting – very civilised but such a long, long, way from anywhere. It really felt like the end of the earth. For us, the highlight was to go to the Elqui Valley and the Atacama desert, both centres of astronomy with no rain, no pollution, no light problems,

clear skies, and so many of the world’s most advanced observatories, both optical and radio. I know the sky is full of stars but until we went to Chile we didn’t realise how true that was. In fact the Milky Way is so full of stars that it really does look milky! We visited one of the many observatories situated in the mountains and spent a couple of hours looking at the dark bands around Jupiter, Saturn’s rings, star clusters of millions of stars in our own galaxy, and a globular galaxy containing billions of stars. We stayed in a hotel with rooms of geodesic domes and opening roofs so we could lie in bed and watch the sky all night. Not mush archaeology, although we did visit a small fortified hill village from the Tiwanaku civilisation that had been taken over and used later by the Inca.

From Chile we moved into Bolivia through an unusual land crossing – we didn’t see a road for two days, just mountain tracks between lakes and volcanoes, around bubbling hot springs and geysers, at heights of up to 5000 metres (it’s the first time I’ve seen an altimeter in a car’s instrumentation!). We crossed the Uyuni salt flats, which are 150 miles long and 50 miles wide, and up to La Paz, where we went to the first major archaeological site at Tiwanaku outside of La Paz.

Dating from 2500 BC to 1200 AD, the Tiwanaku civilisation was based here but spread across Peru and Northern Chile. It all fell apart about 1200 AD after a prolonged period of drought and there were just small communities left when the Inca arrived in 1400 AD. Most of the visible remains at the site date from 300 AD to 600 AD. They consist of stepped pyramids of seven layers in a T-shape rather than the usual rectangle or square. There were sunken courts with carved head embedded in the walls, monolithic statues, sun gates and water courses with extensive raised beds for growing crops. The site suffers from poor excavation in the early 1900’s, and poor reconstruction in the 1960’s, but still a fascinating and spectacular introduction to pre-Inca South American cultures

…. and on to Peru. In the next episode – sites in Northern Peru dating back to 3000BC.

Picture 1: Tiwanaku main gate:

Tiwanaku monolith through main gate

Picture 2: Carved heads at Tiwanaku:

Carved heads in the Kalasasaya

The Croft watermills of Shetland Don Cooper

On a recent visit to the Shetlands we were lucky to be accompanied by Martin Watts one of the foremost experts on watermills in the UK and his wife Sue an expert on quern stones. What fascinated me was that, unlike the rest of the UK, the crofters on Shetland built their own personal water mill rather than take their corn to some central large mill, of which there didn’t seem to be any on Shetland.

When the corn was harvested each summer it was dried, often in the crofter’s own kiln attached to the cottage – there is an example of one at the Shetland Croft Museum. To quote from the Shetland Museum and Archive:

“At one time every croft house had its own kiln for drying corn in preparation for grinding. These were normally rectangular stone constructions that occupied one corner of the barn. However, in the Dunrossness area, where the Croft House Museum is situated, they took on a distinctive circular shape. The kiln was usually built as an appendage to the barn and was accessed via an opening on the inside. From here sticks were laid across the diameter of the kiln to form a platform, on top of which a layer of straw acted as bedding for the grain. A fire was then lit at the end of a small tunnel that led out from the base of the kiln. The heat would rise up from beneath the sticks and dry out the grain.”

When the corn was dry it needed to be ground to make flour, that’s when the croft water mill played its part. The mill was a small dry- stone walled built structure with a thatched roof by the side of a stream. (See photographs below)

The water was diverted from the stream by means of a sluice gate and channelled to the mill in a gutter-like drain. The inside of the mill was on two levels. The upper level was a room that contained a hopper, two millstones and a receiving tray. The lower level was where the diverted water drove a shaft by turning a number of paddles attached to the shaft, this in turn turned the mill stones, so that when a bucket of corn was added to the hopper the turning millstones slowly ground the corn. The water flowing out from the mill is then rechanneled back into the stream.

There are a great many streams flowing down from the hills to the sea on Shetland and as it passed through many crofter’s land on its way, each could have their own individual mill. Mr Smith of the Croft Museum told of a stream that had had nine mills running off it.

Acknowledgements:

Martin and Sue Watts for explaining how the mill works, Shetland Croft Museum, Shetland Museum and archive, Jo Nelhams for one of the photos. Any errors are of course exclusively down to me!!

Fig. 1: Rear-view of a small crofter’s mill, note the water drain diverted from the stream

Figure 2: The hopper, millstones and tray

Figure 3. All is not well down below – but you can see how it should work.

Correspondence

The following letter by Brian Warren has been received in response to the article by Frank Baldwin concerning the Battle of Barnet, reproduced in HADAS Newsletter 508 July 2013:

“Dear Editor,

When an article by Frank Baldwin, on the Battle of Barnet, similar to the one in Newsletter 508, first appeared in the East Herts Archaeological Society’s Newsletter 33, in September 2012, I wrote to him concerning the north/south alignment of the Battle. The correct sequence is to be found in “Reappraisal of the Battle of Barnet 1471” published by Potters Bar and District Historical Society 2009, on pages 36-37.

As can be seen from the plan of the Battle on p.27 in the above publication, the proposed site of the Battle was further north than previously proposed mainly due to the location of the chapel. Whilst my research was regarded as ‘a remarkable piece of work’ I am of the opinion it was then confirmed by the Trust’s project officer, Dr. Glenn Foard. It is important the sequence is recorded correctly for posterity.

Yours sincerely,

Brian Warren”

WHAT’S ON Eric Morgan

Monday 9th September, 3pm Barnet Museum & Local History Society, Church House, Wood Street, Barnet (opposite Museum). The Story of the Long Bow – Bob Hanley. £2

Tuesday 10th September, 7.45pm Amateur Geological Society, The Parlour, St Margaret’s Church, Victoria Avenue N3 1BD (off Hendon Lane). Fossils on Solnhofen – Dr. Chris Duffin (Geological Society, Geologists’ Association).

Friday 13th September, 8pm Enfield Archaeological Society, Jubilee Hall, 2 Parsonage Lane/junction Chaseside, Enfield EN2 0AJ. The Chiselden Cauldrons – Alexandra Baldwin (B.M.). Visitors £2. Refreshments, sales, info 7.30pm.

Saturday 21st & Sunday 22nd September London Open House Weekend. Free access to over 750 buildings. Details at www.openhouselondon.org.uk incl. Saturday 21st 10am-4pm Myddleton House Gardens, Bulls Cross Enfield EN2 9HG, magnificent house of E.A. Bowles (HADAS did resistivity here); Saturday 21st & Sunday 22nd Three Mills House Mill & Green, Three Mills Lane, Bromley-by-Bow E3 3DU – 20min. guided tour of the grinding stones & waterwheels is available www.housemill.org.uk (I admit to a fondness for this place as I am privileged to be able to rehearse here occasionally! VB)

Wednesday 25th September, 7.45pm Friern Barnet & District Local History Society, St. John’s Church Hall (next to Whetstone Police Station), Friern Barnet Lane N20. Stained Glass – talk by Helene Davidian. Visitors £2. Refreshments 7.45pm & after.

Thursday 26th September, 8pm Finchley Society, Martin School, High Road East Finchley N2 (entrance at end of Plane Tree Walk). History of the Martin School – which is celebrating its centenary this year. Please note change of venue. Non-members £2. (HADAS have been digging here this summer).

No. 508 JULY 2013 Edited by Dot Ravenswood

HADAS DIARY

Lectures are held at Avenue House, 17 East End Road, Finchley N3 3QE, starting at 8pm, with tea/coffee and biscuits afterwards. Non-members are welcome (£1.00). Buses 82, 125, 143, 326 and 460 pass nearby. Finchley Central Station (Northern line) is a short walk away.

Sunday 15th September to Thursday 19 September Buxton Trip. See February newsletter for details, or contact Jim & Jo Nelhams (020 8449 7076).

Tuesday 8th October, 8pm Brunel’s Tunnel under the Thames. The first tunnel under a river anywhere in the world, built by Sir Marc Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel (then only 19 years old). A lecture by Robert Hulse, Director of the Brunel Museum.

Tuesday 12th November, 8pm The Lions on Kunulua: excavations of the Early Bronze and Iron Age periods at Tell Tayinat, Hatay, Turkey. Lecture by Dr Fiona Haughey.

Sunday 1st December, 12 noon – 4.30 pm (approx.) HADAS Christmas Party at Avenue House. Buffet lunch. Price £25 to include one drink. Cash bar. Booking details coming soon.

To be continued…

Annual General Meeting Tuesday 11th June 2013

The 52nd Annual General Meeting was held on Tuesday 11th June at 8pm in Avenue House. The meeting was attended by 34 members with apologies from a further 10.

The Chairman, Don Cooper, introduced Harvey Sheldon, who had completed his second 5- year term as President. He was re-elected unanimously to serve a further 5 years. He graciously accepted and proceeded to chair the meeting.

The officers of the Committee were re-elected unopposed. Two members of the Committee, Andrew Coulson and Mary Rawitzer, have not offered themselves for re-election and the Chairman thanked both of them in their absence for their long-standing service to the Committee. The remaining 6 members were re-elected. Two members, Roger Chapman and Simon Williams, offered themselves to serve on the Committee and were duly co-opted.

The Committee consists of Chairman Don Cooper, Vice Chairman Peter Pickering, Hon. Treasurer Jim Nelhams, Hon. Secretary Jo Nelhams, Hon. Membership Secretary Stephen Brunning; and Vicki Baldwin, Bill Bass, Roger Chapman, Eric Morgan, Andrew Selkirk, Tim Wilkins, Sue Willetts, Simon Williams. A discussion took place concerning the position of Church Farmhouse, which has remained in the possession of Barnet Council since its closure. Middlesex University has been granted a 4-year lease but the conditions are still in discussion. English Heritage have not so far included it on the Buildings at Risk register.

The meeting closed at 8.35pm.

There followed presentations of some of the Society’s activities during the year. HADAS have been approached by a number of schools in recent years and have worked with UCL. Don Cooper gave a summary of the 2012 dig at Hendon School and an account of the Thames Foreshore walk led by Dr Fiona Haughey, which was a follow-up to her lecture in May. Bill Bass gave a presentation on the dig which took place at Martin Primary School and also a dig in the grounds of Church Farmhouse, but no sign of the Saxon ditch was found. The evening concluded with Vicki Baldwin giving a picture whistle-stop tour of the long weekend in Ironbridge.

Our thanks to all who attended and those who made contributions to an interesting evening.­­­­­­

HADAS on the foreshore Don Cooper

Following Fiona Haughey’s excellent lecture to HADAS in May (see Peter Pickering’s report) on the Thames at Bankside, she offered to lead a walk along the foreshore on Saturday 1st June 2013. About eighteen members of HADAS and the HADAS finds course turned up on a lovely sunny afternoon.

Figure 1 Fiona points out features

After an introductory chat by Fiona we proceeded gingerly down the steps opposite Tate Modern to the foreshore. It was more or less low tide and so we were able to wander along identifying bits of pottery, clay pipe, glass and building material. As well as barge beds, Fiona showed us the remains of a prehistoric forest, and timbers from 17th- and 18th-century jetties. The key theme of the walk, however, was erosion. Fiona pointed out the amazing amount of erosion there has been in the last ten years. The river is constantly being scoured by the tides, the fast-flowing river and the wash from the great increase in river traffic, especially the large catamarans that serve as river buses. Each episode reveals more and more of the foreshore, exposing layers from the past. Even from our brief walk it was clear that the detritus we recognized on the foreshore in the form of pottery sherds was dated to anywhere between the 17th and 21st centuries. The erosion is not likely to stop anytime soon, so it

Fig.2 Fiona looking at our finds

is important that the foreshore is combed on a regular basis to try and ensure that we extract as much as we can from the artefacts revealed. Thank you Fiona for a lovely afternoon. I’m sure we all enjoyed it. I know I did.

Maritime Archaeology, past, present and future

Lecture by Elliott Wragg Report by Jim Nelhams

Elliott started with definitions:

· Nautical Archaeology covers ships, ports, docks and wharves
· Underwater Archaeology – anything underwater – ships, aircraft, spacecraft, cultural landscapes
· Inter-tidal Archaeology – covers the inter-tidal zone including on tidal rivers
· Maritime Archaeology covers all of the above, and includes trade and industry (including coal), the people involved, and more.

Underwater archaeology started with diving bells which required connection to the surface by a tube. In 1782, the Royal George capsized in Portsmouth Harbour, and first attempts at salvage in 1786 using a diving bell succeeded in raising some of the cannon. In the 1830s, using air-pumped diving suits, further salvage attempts were made.
The invention of SCUBA (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) by Emile Gagnan and Jacques-Yves Cousteau had made everything easier. The first striking success using SCUBA was the salvage by George Bass of a Bronze-Age vessel near Cape Gelidonya in Turkey. This included recording the vessel in position. Techniques resemble land-based work, including the use of planning frames and measurements to create a three-dimensional image. Sand was removed using vacuums. Dramatically improved facilities such as sonar and computer imaging techniques have enabled the comparison of wrecks to the original ships’ plans.

The study of submerged landscapes has shed light on interglacial development and historic global warming. An example is Doggerland in the North Sea, where commercial survey data has been used to map the seabed, though the area has not yet been fully surveyed. Another example is Tybrind Vig, a Mesolithic settlement in Denmark 250m from the coast and 2-3m under the water. Many artefacts have been found, including log boats and the oldest textiles yet found in Europe. In 1999, a Mesolithic site was found near Bouldnor, close to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. Finds on the Thames foreshore have been dated back to 4500 BC.

Some current projects include the recovery of the Holland 5 submarine, which sank under tow in 1912, and was rediscovered in 2000; a number of abandoned hulks in the Severn Estuary; and an underwater discovery trail for divers at Norman’s Bay in Sussex. Other projects exist across the globe.

Underwater sites are difficult to protect and treasure-hunters are a problem, though more in the USA than Britain. Recovering wrecks to land is very expensive and requires extensive conservation work. So wrecks in place need regular recording as the sand moves. War graves have little protection outside territorial waters, and many wrecks are in international waters. The Council for Nautical Archaeology was created in 1964. In 1972, this became the Nautical Archaeological Trust, a registered charity, which was reconstituted as the Nautical Archaeology Society in 1986. The Society (www.nauticalarchaeologysociety.org) has a strong training syllabus, now adopted by many other countries, and strives to develop awareness of the subject. This sometimes brings conflict with environmentalists. At Elliott’s request, his fee was sent as a donation to NAS.

During our Ironbridge trip last year, we were privileged to be shown the conservation centre at the RAF Museum at Cosford, and were told about the wreck of a Dornier 17 bomber in the North Sea. Our guide had been involved in the raising of the Mary Rose, and he told us of plans to raise the Dornier. Recent news on the television has shown the successful lifting of the aircraft, which has gone to Cosford for attention before display at Hendon. Following our visit, HADAS sent a donation to the Dornier fund.

● The Dornier has now been placed in two hydration tunnels where it will remain for the next few years. It will initially be sprayed three times an hour to prevent corrosion. Further details at www.rafmuseum.org.uk/cosford/things-to-see-and-do/dornier-17-conservation.aspx

MEMBERSHIP RENEWAL REMINDER Stephen Brunning
A small number of members have not paid their subscriptions yet. If this applies to you, I would be grateful to receive your cheque by 1st August please. Rates are as follows:
● £15 full

● £5 for each additional member at same address
● £6 for members under 18, or between 18 and 25 and a student in full-time education.

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact me by email (preferred), or telephone. Thank you.

Martin School Centenary Project Bill Bass

Introduction

Martin School is a primary school located in Plane Tree Walk near East Finchley. 2013 is their centenary, and with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund’s All Our Stories programme they are exploring the history of the school and its place in the local community. The project will include oral history interviews, archive research, community events and an “archaeological dig”.

To this end Roger Chapman, a Martin School governor and local archaeology enthusiast, got in touch with HADAS and the UCL during 2012 with a view to us conducting such a dig. On Saturday 1st December 2012, HADAS conducted an informal resistivity survey in the school playing field. This showed a series of regular lines running from SW-NE which looked suspiciously like a field-drain pattern, together with other indications on the resistivity, Victorian finds, and “lumps & bumps” in the field. It was felt that a test-pit excavation and further survey was a viable proposition.

An archaeological programme of events was drawn up to coincide with the school’s History Week, 22-27 April 2013. The aim would be to show Year 3 pupils (and any other interested children/adults) what is involved in an archaeological project – looking at maps, local find spots of archaeology, laying out a formal baseline/grid for surveying purposes, checking OD heights from a bench-mark, digging in a test-pit and washing/interpreting their finds.

The Site

The school lies on the east side of High Road (Great North Road), East Finchley, grid reference TQ 27002/89970. Its playing field, adjacent to the south of the school, has fine views overlooking allotments and the ancient woodlands of Coldfall Wood. The land falls away to the north and to the east, and a bench-mark on the wall in front of the school indicates an OD height of 288.40 feet (87.90m). The archaeological site code is MPS 13.

Earlier maps of the area (kindly supplied by Roger), such as John Rocque 1754, tithe maps 1814, and various OS maps including 1896 and 1950s and others, show that the playing field and what was there before it appears to have always been open ground or fields and has never been disturbed by substantial development. The medieval Great North Road later became the major coaching route through north London. Around 1660 a pig/hog market was developed around Market Place (west of the Great North Road), and pigs were brought in from far and wide to be fattened for the London markets. This is covered by an Area of Special Archaeological Significance. A massive parcel of land just to the north of the school was developed into what is now St Pancras and Islington Cemetery in 1854.

In 1913 the school was laid out along with the adjacent playing field. The architectural plans show a section of land at the west of the playing field (along the Great North Road) being laid out as some form of formal garden with a central fountain, shelters, benches, trees and walkways. However, it is not clear if this was ever built (there are indications of a shortage of funds towards the end of the school construction).

Survey and Archaeology

At the start of the History Week HADAS/UCL plotted out a baseline based on a line projected from the front of the East Finchley Library building immediately south of the site, and into the playing field, giving a straight edge which we can plot on a scale map. Two grids (1 & 2) were laid out (20 x 40m in area) N-S along the baseline (figure 2). Two further grids (3 & 4) of similar dimensions were plotted E-W along the southern edge of the playing field.

Grids 1 & 2 were laid out over an area which covered land adjacent to the Great North Road, the possible formal garden and the drain pattern seen previously. A resistivity survey was undertaken (figure 1), and this was done in 1.00m intervals. The results showed once again the line of possible field drains and some other particularly high and low resistivity points. Three 1.00m squares were selected as excavation test-pits to cover these features

Test-pit 1

Dug in an area between two of the field-drain lines and shown as an anomaly on the resistivity survey, the trench featured a layer of gravel and larger stones beneath the topsoil, with a clayey soil over the natural clay (reach at 88.03m OD). Finds included corroded iron nails, scatters of glass, and white refined and stoneware pottery, mostly 19th to 20th century.

Test-pit 2

This trench was placed over one of the straight lines seen running SW-NE on the resistivity survey, and was thought to be a field drain. Below the topsoil, which contained a fair amount of ashy type clinker, a “drain” feature did indeed appear. It consisted of a light/friable porous “concrete” type material, and each section was octagonal in shape, approx. 0.14cm in diameter and 0.30cm long. It was laid in a cut and surrounded with clinker and slag.

The drain was dug into a gravel layer and then a silty clay layer [205] of possible Victorian/early 20thC date. It sat on a fine clay bed above the natural clay at approx 88.27m OD. The current theory is that it relates to the laying-out of the school and playing field in 1913. But further research is needed as it is of a type we haven’t seen before.

Test-pit 3

Placed over an area of “high” resistivity, the topsoil was immediately busy with many (modern) finds – pot, building material, glass, etc. (including a 1974 penny). Below this was a gravel/rubble deposit, which then turned into a brick/rubble demolition “fill” which had finds of pot, glass, nail and some electrical fittings throughout. Eventually a reinforced “shuttered” concrete wall began to appear, running E-W across the northern area of the trench. The wall was approx. 0.12cm thick, the top splayed out to approx. 0.16cm, but the roof of the feature had been smashed and torched off at some point. This concrete wall appears to have been dug into the natural clay at the northern edge, around 0.48cm below the turf layer at 88.39m OD at the trench NW corner. No other walls were seen in the trench. The rubble appeared to be thinning out at 0.80cm below the turf layer, no floor was seen, and excavation had to stop due to time and safety reasons.

The brick rubble consisted of various types and colours of brick, ranging from “modern” clean red and yellow frogged types to worn, broken and friable red and yellow frogged bricks. Some bricks were not frogged and may be earlier types. The wide variety of bricks seems perhaps to make them unrelated to the concrete wall and therefore possibly backfilling from nearby building demolition or a wartime bomb site. The Finchley Bomb map shows a bomb landing in nearby Creighton Avenue, and some further afield. No structures or buildings are seen on any maps in this area and so the nature of it is unclear. Theories include an underground air-raid shelter, and a ring of above-ground shelters can be seen surrounding the school, some on the northern edge of the playing field. At a recent open day, none of the former pupils from that era could recall an underground air-raid shelter in this area. Other thoughts include an underground culvert of some kind.

A similar survey covered grids 3 & 4. These were laid out over an area which would have been the apron of a sports pavilion on the southern edge of the playing field. Two 1.00m test- pit squares were positioned here for excavation.

Test-pits 4 & 5

Test-pit 4 was placed over an area of low resistance. The topsoil and dark-brown layer beneath produced a mixed variety of finds, including various corroded iron artefacts, glass (vessel and window), animal bone, a scattering of post-medieval pot, and some building

Fig. 1

Fig. 2 Survey and test-pit location

Test pits = ▫ GRID 2 GRID 1 GRID 3 GRID 4 North ↑

material. No features were noted, with natural clay encountered at 88.21m OD. Test-pit 5, a high-resistance spot, also revealed a similar mix of finds, although this trench was deturfed and the topsoil used for the pupils to practise excavating and sieving only.

The soil matrix of test-pits 4 & 5 had a dark black burnt feel to it, with copious amounts of clinker and slag, with some concreted to the pottery and other artefacts. Some bonfires have been reported in this area, but perhaps a higher temperature was involved with the demolition and burning of the nearby pavilion and associated debris?

The natural subsoil is reported as Glacial Till, which consists of brown mottled grey, slightly sandy/silty/gravelly clay (Martin School Planning Statement, Mouchel 2013).

Summary

The History Week appeared to be a success, with the pupils learning about their school’s beginnings and the wartime years. One of the air-raid shelters was used to evoke the atmosphere – tapes of droning wartime bombers and the “all-clear” siren could be heard from the dig. We used the same shelter as our tool store. Over several days young students came out to practise the various methods used in archaeology (figure 3). They seemed to enjoy themselves, although the worms sometimes attracted more attention than the finds!

Figure 3. On the school playing field

Of the archaeology, the use of small test-pits usually throws up more questions than answers. It was pleasing to see that the test-pits more or less corresponded with the resistivity results – the prediction of the field drain and finding the high resistivity of the buried wall and rubble in test-pit 3. This deep-buried wall feature was a bit of a surprise and difficult to interpret, so more excavation is planned for this area, possibly using a machine – watch this space.

Acknowledgments

HADAS: Don Cooper, Tim Curtis, Jim Nelhams, Vicki Baldwin, Angie Holmes and Andy Simpson. Clair Umbo. UCL: Elena Alexi, Hannah Page, Agathe Dupyron, Sarah Dhanjal and Gabe Moshenska. Martin School: Roger Chapman, Tristan Green, Helen Morrison.

A catastrophic history of London: a new course at the City Lit

This new summer archaeology course at the City Lit explores some of the major disasters that have beset the city, and its responses to such traumas as Londinium’s collapse, Saxon Lundenwic’s abandonment, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the Great Fire of 1666.
Tutor: Gustav Milne
Course Code: HAY04
Dates: Saturday 20th July – 10th August, 10:30 – 16:30
Full fee: £150 Senior fee: £91 Concessions: £47
● For further information visit the City Lit website or contact Humanities on 020 7492 2652.
Shakespeare’s Globe brings battlefield drama to Barnet …
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is staging three plays on the same day at four historic battle sites of the Wars of the Roses: Towton, Tewkesbury, St.Albans and Barnet. The Barnet performances will be held on Monken Hadley Common on Saturday 24th August, beginning at 12.30pm.

The plays are Harry the Sixth, The Houses of York & Lancaster and The True Tragedy of the Duke of York. There will be breaks between the three shows and so you can bring a picnic, peruse the food stalls and enjoy the local pubs and walks. A day ticket costs £45. Book online at www.monkenhadleycommon.net or telephone the box office on 020 7401 9919.

… but where did the Battle of Barnet really take place?

Frank Baldwin, Chairman of the Battlefields Trust, asks why the

famous site has yielded no archaeological evidence

The Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471 was one of the most important and eventful battles of the Wars of the Roses. It was the defining moment of a power struggle between the two men who had dominated England since 1461: King Edward IV and his cousin, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. The battle itself is perhaps best known for the fact that it was fought in fog, which made it an unusually confusing and terrifying affair.

Three weeks before the battle, Edward IV, the Yorkist King of England, landed on Spurn Head with a tiny force of perhaps two thousand men. He faced an almost impossible task against the combined forces of his uncle, the Earl of Warwick, and the Lancastrian faction. In an audacious campaign Edward had evaded pursuing armies, recruited a sizeable force and raced south followed by the army of the Earl of Warwick.

On 11 April the citizens of London opened the city gates to Edward, who captured Henry VI and rescued his wife Elizabeth and their son from their sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. On 13 April Edward and his army of around 9,000 marched out to confront Warwick: …..he roode to Barnete, x myles owte of London, where his aforne-riders had founden the afore-riders of th’Erles of Warwikes hooste, and bet them, and chaced them out of the towne, more some what than an halfe myle; when, undre an hedge-syde, were redy assembled a great people, in array, of th’Erls of Warwike.

Barnet also has something to tell us about the development of the use of gunpowder weapons. Warwick had access to the Tower Arsenal and could have had up to 100 field pieces: ….on the nyght, weninge gretly to have anoyed the Kynge, his hooste, with shotte of gonnes, th’Erls fielde shotte gunes almost all the nyght. But, thanked be God! it so fortuned that they alway ovarshote the Kyngs hoste, and hurtyd them nothinge, and the cawse was the Kyngs hoste lay muche nerrar them than they demyd.

Edward launched a dawn attack on Warwick and eventually prevailed, despite Warwick’s right overcoming Edward’s left and with the help of what is now described as friendly fire between Warwick’s victorious right, returning to the battlefield, and his centre. As a Lancastrian chronicler wrote: ….the myste was so thycke, that a manne myghte not profytely juge one thynge from anothere; so the Erle of Warwikes menne schott and faughte ayens the Erle of Oxenfordes menne, wetynge and supposynge that thei hade bene Kynge Edwardes menne; and anone the Erle of Oxenforde and his menne cryed “treasoune! treasoune!” and fledde awaye from the felde with viij.c. menne. »»

»» The precise battle site cannot be stated with certainty. The main contemporary source places it up to a mile north of Barnet and one account mentions a hedge, thought to be on Old Ford Manor Golf Course. The English Heritage Battlefields panel placed the most likely site of the Battle of Barnet as being: “Hadley Green, due to it being a plateau and the highest local ground on the Great North Road. The most obvious site for the Lancastrian deployment is the ridge leading west of Hadley common, with the left east of the junction between Hadley Highstone and Dury Road and the right stretching across the golf course. The Yorkists probably deployed across the road at the northern edge of modern High Barnet.”

The interpretation of the battlefield of Barnet has changed over the last two hundred years. The first interpretation was by Alfred J Kempe, a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1844, who positioned the overlap of the Yorkists over the Lancastrians on the western side. In January 1882, Frederick Charles Cass, the rector of Monken Hadley, published an account in the Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society which positioned the battlefield in the area accepted by English Heritage. The vicar was the first to identify the site as Monken Hadley and the orientation as north-south.

In 1892 James Ramsay published Lancaster and York. He interpreted the battle with Warwick’s line extending not from east to west, but from north to south along the line of the old St. Albans road either side of Hadley High Stone, in order to take the King’s troops in detail as they came out of the narrow streets of Barnet. This interpretation was echoed in C.R. B. Barrett’s Battles and Battlefields in England (London 1896). It remained unchallenged until Alfred Burne, an experienced soldier of the Great War and local resident, put forward an interpretation that returned to that of Charles Cass. He linked the comments about Warwick’s deployment close to a hedge to the ancient hedge on Old Ford Manor Golf Course.

The Battle of Barnet is depicted in many books about military history. However, in most cases the interpretation rests on the above interpretations. In many cases the interpretations include fanciful detail such as the location of the archers, cavalry and cannon for which there is no documentary evidence. These may have been present, but we have no evidence to suggest how they were employed.

The creation of the battlefields register by English Heritage was a landmark for battlefield preservation in England and indeed the UK. For the first time battlefields would receive some form of statutory protection. The battles had to meet the criteria that they were significant, the location was known and the battlefield itself had not been built over. Barnet was included with the initial assessment and the Burne interpretation was broadly followed by English Heritage in 1995.

Yet inconsistencies in the English Heritage interpretation have become more glaring. The Hadley Green position appeared to be simply too small to accommodate the forces. Did the Earl of Warwick really deploy 15,000 men on a frontage of less than a kilometre? This would be 15 deep, approximating to the depth of the phalanxes of Macedonia and the Swiss pikemen. Fitting these men into the Hadley Green position demands that a substantial part of Warwick’s army fights with the slope to Dead Man’s Bottom at its rear. The battlefield is far from a level plain. The Lancastrian line appears to pass through Old Ford Manor and Monken Hadley Church, neither of which is mentioned in the accounts.

No archaeological evidence of the battle has turned up. Surely, if an army fires up to one hundred guns all night, the cannon balls must have gone somewhere? Something should have been dropped or lost. The TV series Two Men in a Trench excavated around the ancient hedge on Old Ford Golf Course, but found nothing conclusive. No-one expected to find much from a battle that occurred 500 years ago.

In around 2005 the Battlefields Trust worked with a group from HADAS to try to find more about the battlefield. HADAS member Andrew Coulson collected information about reported finds of shot, and local stories about battlefield finds, graves and battle accounts. A local historian, Brian Warren, carried out a remarkable piece of work, interpreting the landscapes of the 16th century from old Land Registry entries as well as identifying the chantry for the dead at Kitts End. This was sufficient for the Battlefield Trust’s project officer Dr Glenn Foard to propose an alternative location further north, at Kitts End.

The success of Glenn Foard and his team in rediscovering Bosworth opens up another possibility. As with Barnet, no-one had found evidence for the battle. But it was not because the material had decayed or been salvaged. It was because archaeologists had been looking in the wrong place. Perhaps the reason no-one has found anything at Barnet is because we have been looking in the wrong place? Bosworth shows that with modern tools and techniques, patience and some good fortune, it is possible to find the relics of battles of this era.

We recently launched a project to re-examine the Barnet battlefield site. We will obtain professional support and seek to explore the battlefield within the context of other work on early gunpowder weapons. Fortunately there is no immediate threat to the battlefield and we must first raise funds to support this. If anyone would like to help, please email harvey.watson@tiscali.co.uk. reprinted by kind permission of the author

Other societies’ events Eric Morgan

Monday 5th – Friday 9th August & Monday 12th – Friday 16th August. WEAG and Copped Hall Trust Archaeological Project: Field Schools 2013. Continuing excavations of the Tudor Grand House near Epping. Full details in June Newsletter. To book, contact Andrew Madeley, 27 Hillcrest Road, South Woodford, London E18 2JL. Phone: 020 8491 6514. Email: coppedhalldigs@weag.org.uk.

Saturday 10th August:-

From 10am London Canal Museum, 12-13 New Wharf Road, Kings Cross N1 9RT. Celebrate Ice. Descend the ice wells, see new exhibits and new exhibition on the ice trade. Open day marking culmination of the Ice Project.

2-3pm. Forty Hall, Forty Hill Enfield EN2 9HA. Rainton Tour offers a look at the private and professional life of Sir Nicholas Rainton in his home. £8 (£5 concessions).

Monday 12th August, 1.30-4.30pm London Canal Museum (as above). Digging Deeper Study Day: Gatti’s Empire. LCM research team: London at Work and Leisure in the 19th century and Gatti’s influential role. Talks on the ice trade to music halls, and past city life. £10 including refreshments. To book online visit www.canalmuseum.org.uk/book, or phone 020 7713 0836 (£1 booking fee).

Tuesday 13th August, 7.45pm Amateur Geological Society, The Parlour, St Margaret’s church, Victoria Avenue N3 1BD (off Hendon Lane). Members’ evening. Talks by members, including Mike Howgate (Chairman) on Boreholes of London and Area 1887, and Len Tapper on Cretaceous Park, with display of fossils. »»

»» Thursday 15th August, before 8.30pm Highgate Cemetery, Swain’s Lane N6 6PJ. East Cemetery late opening. Entrance £4. Also evening tours at 7.30pm, tickets £8. Book on www.highgatecemetery.org/events.

Friday 16th August, 7pm CoLas, St Olave’s Parish Hall, Mark Lane EC3. Members’ evening. Talks by members. Visitors £2. Refreshments.

Saturday 17th August, 2-3pm Forty Hall (as above). Architectural tour offers an in-depth look at the interior and exterior architecture, including the cellars. £8 (£5 concessions).

Tuesday 27th August, 2-3pm Harrow Museum, Headstone Manor, Pinner View, North. Harrow HA2 6PX. History of Hatch End. Talk by Pat Clarke. £3.

o. 507 JUNE 2013 Edited by Stephen Brunning

HADAS DIARY 2013

Tuesday 11th June @ 8pm: Annual General Meeting. Please refer to last month’s newsletter which included the AGM papers. (A limited number of spare copies will be available at the meeting). Do make sure you come along and support HADAS!

Sunday 15th to Thursday 19th September. Buxton Trip. Please see February newsletter for details, or contact Jim & Jo Nelhams. (020 8449 7076). The cost is £450pp sharing a double/twin room, or £495 for singles. There were still a couple of vacancies as this newsletter went to press.

Tuesday 8th October @ 8pm: Brunel’s tunnel under the Thames. Lecture by Robert Hulse – Director of the Brunel Museum.

Tuesday 12th November @ 8pm: The Lions on Kunulua – excavations of Early Bronze and Iron Age periods at Tell Tayinat, Hatay, Turkey. Lecture by Dr Fiona Haughey.

Sunday 1st December: Christmas Party at Avenue House, 12 noon – 4.30 pm (approx.) A buffet lunch. Price £25 to include one drink. Cash Bar. Booking details coming soon.

The 2014 lecture series is currently being planned. As usual they will be at 8pm on the second Tuesday in the month: 14th January, 11th February, 11th March, 8th April, 13th May, 10th June (AGM), 14th October and 11th November. As each talk is confirmed it will advertised in this section of the newsletter, but don’t forget to keep the dates free!

All Lectures are held at Avenue House, 17 East End Road, Finchley, N3 3QE, and start promptly at 8.00 pm, with coffee /tea and biscuits afterwards. Non-members welcome (£1.00). Buses 82, 125, 143, 326 & 460 pass nearby and Finchley Central Station (Northern line) is a short walk away.

HADAS committee members URGENTLY required!

Our constitution allows for 12 committee members in addition to the officers. Last year we had 9 but this year only 6 have offered themselves for re-election. Though the enthusiasm for coming on all-day visits to archaeological and historic sites remains, we do not now have enough people prepared to arrange these visits. We therefore need more members to come forward, keep HADAS the vibrant and active local archaeological society it is and help shape its future. Some of us have been on the committee for many years and we urgently require “new blood” with fresh ideas so that HADAS can remain at the forefront of Voluntary & Community archaeology. A couple of our officers have also expressed a wish to retire, and if the current rate of decline continues we are at risk of dissolution after 52 years in existence! PLEASE, PLEASE consider joining the management committee. The Committee meets five times a year, in the evenings. Come along to the AGM and speak to either myself (Stephen Brunning) or Chairman Don Cooper. The constitution allows for nominations at the meeting. You can also telephone me on 020 8959 6419 beforehand. We desperately need your help!!
Notes and Queries by Ann Saunders

From the 1870’s William Morris travelled and stayed in Leek in the Peak District to work with a man called Thomas Wardle, who had travelled to India to study the dyeing and weaving of silk, about which he was passionate, and, in particular, to study the intricacies of the use of woad, a peculiarly difficult skill.

Before long Morris began to entrust his designs to Wardle; the firm has an archive of some 4,500 vintage designs on metal rollers, not necessarily all by Morris. The association continued after Morris’ death in 1896 and the firm continued to exist for another century, but lack of demand closed it down in the 1990’s along with other industries in the town.

A decade into the present century, Bonsoir of London, established in 1926 and now England’s oldest specialist retailer of luxury nightwear were looking for a printed silk supplier. By chance, Deborah Price, head buyer for Bonsoir, was told of the firm by a friend living in Leek. Contact was made and the firm are now printing again.

Might this make a good expedition for when HADAS are in Buxton?

Current Archaeology Backnumbers

HADAS member Jean Lamont has a collection of magazines she wants to give away free to a good home. They start at number 148 to the present issue. If you would like to take the entire set off her hands, please telephone Jean on 020 8449 7711.

Copped Hall Fieldwork

The Copped Hall Trust Archaeological Project (CHTAP) is carrying out a programme of excavations on the site of the earlier mansion (“old” Copped Hall), which stood at the northern end of the gardens and was demolished in 1748. The site is mainly Tudor but there are finds from all periods from the modern back to medieval, Saxon, Roman and prehistoric times (the Iron Age and earlier). Copped Hall is located near Epping, Essex.

In July 2013 the CHTAP will be running three Taster Weekends, each one aimed at teaching beginners the absolute basics of archaeology and excavation.

The dates will be as follows: Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 July, Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 July, Saturday 27 July and Sunday 28 July.

Each weekend will include presentations by a professional archaeologist on methods of investigation and on finds, but the aim of the weekend will be for students to spend the great majority of their time on actual excavation.

Cost of each weekend will be £50.

In August 2013 two five-day Field Schools will be held for those who have already learned the basics of excavation and recording, either at Copped Hall or elsewhere, and wish to develop their skills further. The aim of the schools will be to advance the archaeology of old Copped Hall.

The Field School dates will be as follows: Monday 6 – Friday 9 August; Monday 12 – Friday 16 August inclusive.

Weather permitting; the students will work in the trench all week under the direction of professional archaeologists, assisted by supervisors who know the site very well.
Certificates will be awarded to those who complete each School.

Cost of the Field School will be £90 for the week.

Bookings must be for a whole Taster Weekend or a whole Field School (not single days)

For more information or to make a booking, please contact:
Mr Andrew Madeley,
27 Hillcrest Road, South Woodford, London E18 2JL.
Tel: 020 8491 6514
Email: coppedhalldigs@weag.org.uk. Website: http://www.coppedhalltrust.org.uk

May Lecture – 10,000 Years of History beneath your Feet: the Bankside
Foreshore. Review by Peter Pickering

Fiona Haughey’s lecture at our May meeting gave us even more than it said on the tin – 10,000 years indeed, but going far further up- and down-stream than the Bankside foreshore. Fiona explained that the Thames river system until recent times had been much more than the single mighty river we see to-day – rather a river with several channels and many streams running into it (the ‘lost rivers of London’); its course in Mesolithic times was well south of the present one. Erosion is continuing apace, as dredging makes the banks slump into the river, speeding catamarans wash the foreshore away, and the mitten crab burrows uncontrollably; the effect on stratigraphy is that earlier deposits may lie above later ones, having fallen on them when eroding from the banks. In Roman times high water was two metres above low water; the range is now eight metres. The foreshore that Fiona now studies is very different from that of which Ivor Noël Hume produced a map (which she showed us) in 1949. Submerged forests and hidden structures (fish traps, causeways, a ‘gridiron’ frame of
parallel wooden beams for supporting a barge, etc.) have appeared and disappeared again, when washed away or pilfered. Fiona reminded us that changes since the war have certainly not been all deleterious – the Thames used to be a virtually dead river, but is now teaming with wildlife.

Fiona regaled us with slides of the enormous quantity of things she has retrieved from the foreshore. They ranged from flints and handaxes, through quantities of weapons (Bronze Age, Viking, Second World War), clay pipes, wig curlers, bottles, to Hindu votive
offerings. And, of course, quantities of pieces of pottery and kiln furniture. But not coins; Fiona is not into coins, which might be legally treasure, and are the target of unscrupulous metal-detectorists. As well as slides, Fiona brought many examples of her finds for us to study, particularly inscribed clay pipe bowls and bottles with lettering. Fiona made the important and, to me, new observation that the fashionable explanation of some foreshore finds, that they were ritual offerings to the river or divine powers connected to it, failed to take account of the fact that many of them had been deposited on dry land which had just eroded into the water.

A tribute to Mary O’Connell by Tessa Smith

I made friends with Mary O.Connell through HADAS when she had just retired from teaching Domestic Science. She was great fun, interested in everything and looking for something to occupy her lively mind. She qualified as a Blue Badge Guide at St Pauls Cathedral and her particular patch of London was Clerkenwell. She loved finding out the quirky and unusual aspects of places and with her ability to communicate she soon became a very popular guide. She led many walks with HADAS -the Whitechapel Bell Foundry – Sadlers Wells where we all peered down the actual well backstage – the old Operating Theatre and museum, and the Thomas Coram Foundation foundling hospital to name a few.

We loved every walk because Mary always managed to discover such funny and interesting things, and she told them with such a twinkle in her eye and infectious chuckle.

When she moved to Taunton to be nearer to her daughter she still kept closely in touch with her London friends and I enjoyed her warm hospitality both in her bungalow in Taunton and her cosy home in Colindale. She was a very talented lady.

LAMAS Local History Committee also needs you!

The LAMAS Local History Committee is on the lookout for new members to represent the views of local history societies in the Greater London area. The committee meets three times a year and in between members carry forward the decisions of the committee. If you are interested or know of someone who maybe willing to join the committee please get in touch with John Hinshelwood 0208 3483375 (johnhinshelwood@btinternet.com) or Eileen Bowlt, 01895 638060, (c.bowlt@tiscali.co.uk).

First World War Centenary by Peter Pickering

2014 will be the centenary of the First World War. As Diane Lees, the Director of the Imperial War Museum has said, “The First World War was a turning point in world history, claiming the lives of over 16 million people across the globe. Almost all of us have a connection to it, whether it’s through family history, links to our local community or because of its far-reaching impact on the world we live in today.”

Last month, on 15th May the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) launched “First World War: then and now”, a £6 million small grants programme to help communities mark this centenary. HLF is making at least £1 million available per year for six years until 2019. It will provide grants between £3,000 and £10,000 enabling communities and groups right across the UK to explore, conserve and share their First World War heritage and deepen their understanding of the impact of the conflict.

Do members think HADAS should do something special to mark the centenary next year? If so, please let me know by telephoning 020 8445 2807, email pe.pickering@virgin.net, or express your views at the AGM.

COLAS site visit to 64-74 Mark Lane, EC3. By Bill Bass.

This was a dig carried-out by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) at 64-74 Mark Lane and 5-12 New London Street (opposite St Olave’s Hall). The visit was on behalf of the City of London Archaeological Society. Our group was met by MOLA Senior Project Manager Stewart Hoad and together with Site Supervisor Andy Daykin we were given a tour of the excavation. Room was tight so we could only look down from an adjacent access gantry – no comfy portacabin here. At the time of visiting on 20th May the dig was in its last week, so the work was concentrated in a busy north-west corner of the site. While the existence of an underground car-park ramp and basements had truncated much of the later archaeology, the bottom of features and deposits still produced some good evidence. Some photos taken on the day:

Mark Lane looking East

Mark Lane looking South

Mark Lane looking West

Mark Lane dig – Hearth

Mark Lane dig – Roman Pot

Roman

This area has been well studied over the years; i.e. sites on Fenchurch Street, at Lloyd’s Register, Plantation House and Dunster Court and others, so there was a fair expectation of what could be found. It is thought that the area had early Roman occupation consisting of an E-W road to the south of our site, which was probably laid out in c AD 50, lined with clay and timber buildings. These were later rebuilt after the Boudican fire of AD 60/1 as houses, shops, and work-places. The early nature of the occupation is also indicated by boundary ditches and the lack of burials showing a pre-walled settlement.

Much of the Mark Lane deposits indicated the ‘backyard’ nature found to the rear of such workaday properties, with a tiled hearth, pits, post-holes and redeposited brickearth deposits being recorded. Finds included pot, glass and worked bone. We were shown a tray of Roman late 1st to early 2nd Century pottery from a particularly rich context, a mix of samian, greywares and decorated wares, like large pieces of a ‘poppy head’ beaker. Most of the other finds had been moved off-site for processing due to the lack of space.

Medieval

Mark Lane (aka Marthe Lane) is first documented in c 1200. From c 1170s to 1385 our site lies entirely within an area known as the Manor of Blanch Appleton and held by the Bohuns, the Earls of Hereford and Essex who held manor courts there. In 1385 the property was sub-divided which led to a change of use for the site. Mark Lane and Hart St would have been fronted with timber framed shops, with stone built cellars below and further upper storeys of residential units. The yard areas would have contained features such as communal wells, while cess and rubbish was disposed of in deep stone lined pits. Periodically these pits were scoured out.

Indeed, similar features to those expected were being dug, a wood lined barrel pit/well, a chalk lined cess pit and chalk walls. Earlier in the excavation an excellent complete example of a ‘baluster’ tulip shaped jug of the 13th to 14th century was found.

There was not much of the post-medieval to be seen but a 16th century brick and chalk cess pit was exposed, and interestingly, two plates have been found recently, inscribed with the text ‘St OH 1829’, these parish boundary plates are presumed to be associated with the Parish of St Olave’s.

Many thanks to Stewart Hoad and Andy Daykin of MOLA, for giving their time in a busy period and to Rose Baillie of CoLAS, for her organisation of another of these fascinating site visits. Thanks also to McAlpine Construction for kind permission to visit.

Bibliography: 64-74 Mark Lane, MoLAS Archaeological desk-based assessment, December 2006.

Other Societies’ events, compiled by Eric Morgan

Saturday 6th July. Barnet Museum and Local History Society. Coach outing to Paycocke’s, Coggeshall, Essex. Coggeshall dates back to early Saxon settlement. There is evidence of a Roman villa or settlement before then and the town lies on Stane Street. Roman coins dating from 31BC to 395AD have been found in the area. Paycocke’s is a house built c1500 and features elaborate wood panelling & carvings. It also features gates which may been from the nearby abbey. For details please contact Pat Alison on 01707 858430, email patron37@sky.com or telephone Barnet Museum on 020 8440 8066.

Tuesday 9th July, 7.45pm. Amateur Geological Society. The Parlour, St Margaret’s Church, Victoria Avenue N3 1BD (off Hendon Lane). Sinking Cities. Talk by Dr Tony Waltham (Geophotos).

Friday 12th to Sunday 14th July. Festival of British Archaeology. Enfield Archaeological Society. Dig at Theobalds Palace, Cedars Park, Cheshunt, Herts. Please contact Mike Dewbrey on 01707 870888 (office number) for more details, or see blog http://enfieldarchaeology.wordpress.com, or website http://www.enfarchsoc.org.

Saturday 13th to Sunday 28th July. Festival of British Archaeology. Museum of London, 150 London Wall EC2Y 5HN & LAARC, Mortimer Wheeler House, 46 Eagle Wharf Road, N17ED. The Secret Museum. Exclusive behind the scenes tours of stores & labs. Discover the secrets of our collections. Explore usually hidden spaces. ALSO Saturday 20th & Sunday 21st July. Visit Billingsgate Roman House & Baths. Lower Thames Street EC3.

Sunday 14th & Sunday 28th July. Festival of British Archaeology. London Canal Museum, 12-13 New Wharf Road, Kings Cross N1 9RT. Open Days. Includes an opportunity to descend the Ice Well. ALSO from Tuesday 16th July. Exhibition: The Gatti Empire. ALSO Monday 22nd July, 1.30-4.30pm. Digging Deeper Study Day. Mrs Marshall – Ice Cream Queen. Talk by Dr Annie Gray, food historian and ice cream expert. Discover the history, the flavours, the exquisite display & taste. £10 includes refreshments.

Tuesday 16th to Sunday 21st July. Festival of British Archaeology. Enfield Archaeological Society. Dig at Elsyng Palace, Forty Hall. Forty Hill, Enfield EN2 9HA. Please see contact details as above. ALSO Saturday 20th July, 2-3pm. Rainton Tour. Offers a look at the private and professional life of Sir Nicholas Rainton in his home. £8 (£5 concessions).

Until Sunday 7th July Mon-Fri (except Tues) 12-5pm, weekends 10.30am to 5pm. Harrow Museum, Headstone Manor, Pinner View, North Harrow HA2 6PX. Harrow on the Hill exhibition: Harrow’s Secret Heart. Discover the history, its people & buildings (includes details of the HADAS 2011 dig).

Saturday 27th & Sunday 28th July, 11am-4pm. CoLAS at the Tower. Foreshore access and public displays. Part of the Festival of British Archaeology. Activities in the open space, front of the Tower beside the Thames. Handle finds and visit tower beach. Free. ALSO from Thursday 4th July. Fortress Tower. The moat will be home to replica siege machines, archery, combat, cooking and games 14th century style.

Wednesday 31st July, 1-2pm. Museum of London, London Wall, EC2Y 5HN. Meet the expert. With Francis Grew (Senior Curator of Archaeology). Free.

Unfortunately some times were omitted in last month’s newsletter from some of the events. These times are as follows:

Thursday 6th June. St Pancras Old Church. The time is 7pm.

Friday 7th June. Chipping Barnet Library. The time is 6.30-7.30pm.

Monday 10th June. Barnet Museum and Local History Society. The time is 3pm.

Friday 21st June. Wembley History Society. The time is 7.30pm.

Thursday 27th June. Finchley Society. The time is 8pm.

No. 505 APRIL 2013 Edited by Peter Pickering

H A D A S D I A R Y – Forthcoming Lectures and Events.

Lectures are held at Avenue House, 17 East End Road, Finchley, N3 3QE, and start promptly at 8 pm, with coffee/tea and biscuits (£1) afterwards. Non-members: £1. Buses 82, 125, 143, 326 & 460 pass nearby and Finchley

Central station (Northern Line), is a short walk away.

Tuesday 9th April 2013: Nautical Archaeology – past, present and future. Lecture by Courtney Nimura & Eliott Wragg.

Courtney Nimura is a PhD Candidate at the University of Reading studying prehistoric maritime rock art in Scandinavia. She previously worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (USA) in Conservation and Collections Management before returning to university in the UK. Courtney has a BA and MFA in photography / museum studies from the United States, and an MA in Maritime Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. Alongside her work with the Nautical Archaeology Society, she works for the Thames Discovery Programme in London.

Eliott Wragg has a BA in Ancient History and Archaeology and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Field Archaeology, both from Birmingham University and an MA in Maritime Archaeology from UCL. He worked as an Archaeological Site Assistant for the Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit and Pre-Construct Archaeology before becoming a Senior Archaeologist for the latter and then going on to work as a freelance site supervisor and project manager on sites in the South-East of England. He is currently the Field Officer for the Thames Discovery Programme and has a particular interest in vessels and vessel fragments.

Tuesday 14th May 2013 – 10,000 years of History beneath your Feet: The Bankside Foreshore. Lecture by Dr Fiona Haughey.

1st June 2013 Foreshore Walk – Following her talk, Dr Haughey has offered to give us a tour of the foreshore of the river by Bankside and the Tate Modern, numbers permitting. The walk will take about two hours and cost £5 per person. The date has been chosen because then the tide is most suitable. The idea is we meet at the Millennium Bridge, south side, in front of the Tate Modern ready to leave at 13.30. The walk will take place provided there are at least 15 participants (the maximum number is 20) and it will be first come first served. Contact Don Cooper telephone 020 8440 4350, e-mail: chairman@hadas.org.uk

Tuesday 11th June 2013 -Annual General Meeting.Sunday 15th to Thursday 19th September 2013 – Buxton Trip

We now have sufficient members signed up for our trip in September based in Buxton, Derbyshire to make the trip viable. See February newsletter for details. It would still be nice to have a few more.

Our selected hotel should provide comfort for all, with excellent company provided by other HADAS members. If you are interested but have not yet signed up, please contact Jim or Jo Nelhams (see last page for contact details).

Tuesday 8th October 2013 – Brunel’s Tunnel under the Thames. Lecture by Robert Hulse, Director of the Brunel Museum.

Tuesday 12th November 2013 – Lions on Kunulua – excavations of Early Bronze and Iron Age periods at Tell Tayinat, Hatay, Turkey. Lecture by Dr Fiona Haughey.

Sunday 1st December 2013 – Following our enjoyable Christmas event in the last two years, we have again booked Avenue House. The “party” will run from roughly 12:00 to 4:30. More details in due course.

‘The Archaeology of the First Peoples into North America.’ course by Peter Nicholson
The Mill Hill Archaeological Study Society is running a course of six classes with this title. The course will examine the archaeology of the first of the native peoples into North America. We will investigate theories regarding the entry and date via the Bering Strait and routes available to the newcomers from Alaska and the Yukon. The Clovis and then Folsum expansion into the Great Plains will be dealt with as will the possible human causes of the megafauna extinction. Questionable sites and theories will be covered along with the latest theories concerning language and DNA. Finally we will study the problems of working with living indigenous peoples and their attitude to archaeology and the excavation of burial sites. The course tutor is Scott

McCracken. The course is on Friday mornings from 10 to 12, beginning 19th April, in the Eversfield Centre, 11 Eversfield Gardens, Mill Hill, NW7 2AE. The cost for the course will be £40. Enrol at the first meeting; if you have not previously attended the Society’s meetings please contact the secretary, Peter Nicholson (020-8959 4757).

CBA Winter meeting at York on 2nd & 3rd March 2013 by Don Cooper
This meeting was themed as a forum on the ‘Role of local societies in archaeology in the 21st century’. Representatives of a large number of societies, both county level societies and small local ones, attended. It was interesting that the activities of large and small societies were very similar, namely: A winter lecture series for members, outings in the summer, small scale excavations and fieldwalking, newsletters or leaflets (various frequencies from monthly to once a year), training in the form of one day courses all the way to full 22 week ones, and social and fund-raising events. Most societies do their best to ‘defend’ local heritage, but find it difficult to mobilise support in strength.

The issues facing the societies are also very similar: a declining and ageing membership, increased cost of communication with members (publishing newsletters, postage etc.), and very few active members, (for instance, a number of societies have stopped doing outings as there was no one to run them).

A major challenge is technology and multi-media with many of the more senior members of societies finding that receiving information such as newsletters by email, electronic payment for subscriptions, using web sites, Facebook, blogspots and Twitter, difficult to understand and use. As a consequence the gradual change over to online media from paper and posted mail is and will be more difficult and expensive for local societies.

In these challenging times, partnerships with other heritage societies as well as non-heritage societies offer an opportunity to pursue local goals more effectively and ‘beef-up’ the strength of advocacy in defence of heritage.Overall the forum enabled an exchange of ideas on the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities and threats facing local and county societies and provided an opportunity for establishing inter society relationships.

February Lecture – Can you tell a Longboat from a Log Boat? Tessa Smith

I think I can now, thanks to the lecture entitled “From Logboat to Warrior – Evolution of the Wooden Ship” given by Eliott Wragg – Field Officer of the Thames Discovery Programme.

Eliott steered us expertly at a rate of knots from skin boats to log boats to clinker-built boats, from the introduction of masts, sails, paddles and rudder, from river and estuary boats to sea-worthy ships and from fighting and merchant types made entirely of wood to the rise of the iron ship.

One of the earliest boats mentioned in the lecture was the Hasholme Iron Age logboat made around 300 BC from a single large hollowed oak tree dug out by hand or burned out by fire and made watertight by a mixture of moss and twigs. It had a small shelf at one end and would have been manoeuvred by a pole.
The Dover bronze age boat is much older, dating from 1500 BC, the middle bronze age. It is one of the world’s oldest known sea-going boats. It was excavated in 1992 and I remember the excitement in the press at the time, so much so that Sheila Woodward and I organised a HADAS outing to Dover to see it in the museum’s spectacular new gallery. It was impressive, made using four huge oak planks sewn together with yew lashings, a technique which was clearly visible to us.

The oldest archaeological find of a wooden Nordic boat is the Hjortspring, built about 350BC, the oldest known boat to use clinker planking, where the planks overlap one another. Later designs had stronger keels and the hull was reinforced by oak stathes joined by iron rods – boats were becoming more sea-worthy.

The Anglo Saxon early 7th century burial ship at Sutton Hoo is a longboat (in fact 90 feet long) and is a fast shallow draft vessel, but there is no evidence of sail or mast. But the Oseberg Viking longboat built around 820AD has a mast holder for a square wooden sail amidship; it is the biggest Viking longboat ever found, a massive 36 metres, 4 metres longer than the Mary Rose.

During the middle ages ships became more seaworthy both for fighting and carrying cargo. The development of masts and sails meant that the ships were no longer dependent on oarsmen and could travel vast distances using wind power.

Fighting castles were added fore and aft as in the Grace Dieu built in 1418 for Henry V, and the Mary Rose built in 1511 for Henry VIII, carrying heavier and more powerful guns. Extraordinary ornamentation carvings and gilding were added, evoked for us by paintings of ships in full sail, dipping, turning and wheeling.

To this day it is not entirely clear how the ship wheel evolved during the 18th century, but it was a huge technical breakthrough, controlling the rudder by a series of block and tackle, gear wheels, cogs and chains.

With the development of ironclad wooden boats and ships made of iron, wooden boats could not compete. In1843 Brunel’s Great Britain became the first iron steamer to cross the Atlantic; in 1860 Warrior became the first entirely iron boat, thus initiating the decline of the age of magnificent great wooden ships.

Eliott steered us expertly back to harbour, somewhat breathless through our journey by wooden boat, many, many of which had sunk, and as he said ‘it was very convenient for us – all those boats sinking.’

Current Archaeology Conference Peter Pickering

I attended Current Archaeology’s annual conference on 1st and 2nd March. Like last year, it was in the University of London Senate House, and the Beveridge Hall, which holds 450, was well filled, very largely, I judged, with Current Archaeology readers from outside London. The programme included reports on important recent excavations.

From the prehistoric age we learnt of some very grand Neolithic structures at the Ness of Brodgar (with traces of colouring), which would have graced the prehistoric Mediterranean; of the nine bronze age river boats at Must Farm (quite near Flag Fen); and of the colossal hill fort (the largest in Britain and four times as big as Maiden Castle) at Ham Hill Somerset.
There were three talks on Roman Britain. Keith Parfitt brought us up to date on the Folkestone Roman Villa with its important but previously unknown Iron Age predecessor (memorably visited by HADAS in 2011); it was good to learn that further work there is planned this year, since the whole site will sooner or later fall into the sea. Andrew Birley talked about Vindolanda, a very popular site for volunteers; he showed us two pieces of beautiful painted glass from Cologne which were found in different parts of the site, but which fitted together. The division between military and civilian in Vindolanda became blurred in the fourth century, and activity seems to have continued in some form long after the end of Roman rule. Ian Haynes talked about the strange case of the Maryport altars, unearthed from pits by antiquarians in the nineteenth century and long believed to have been buried deliberately each one in advance of the dedication of the next, but which now appear to have been used as filling for pits holding structural timber uprights of a late building (perhaps related to some post- Roman tombstones inscribed in Latin).

There were three reports on community projects on Anglo-Saxon villages. The cemetery in Oakington, Cambridgeshire, has produced several intriguing burials, including two with horses, one with a cow and one with a spoon – thought to have been a weaning spoon. The exploration of the cemetery is being complemented by small digs around the village, to improve knowledge of the settlement. The Lyminge Archaeological Project is investigating a settlement that was of high status before the conversion to Christianity (with a large timber hall) and became a double monastery (monks and nuns), with a great quantity of fish bones. Neil Faulkner has a long-running project at Sedgeford in Norfolk, but is concerned by the lack of a conceptual framework for Anglo-Saxon settlements like that for the Roman period, with towns, villages, villas and forts; he believes that archaeology can produce that framework, and gave an account of Anglo-Saxon history as evolution from small egalitarian settlements to feudal villages dominated by thegns and the church.

For later times we had Richard Buckley on Richard III; Heather Knight on the Curtain Playhouse, revealed by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) and to be preserved in some way as that area of Shoreditch is redeveloped; Pieta Greaves on the conservation of the Staffordshire Hoard; and the osteologist Don Walker on the evidence of mass fatalities from the Spitalfields cemetery, which he believes point to a famine attributable to the effect of a volcanic eruption (perhaps in South America) in 1258.

There was also a whole session on Herculaneum and Pompeii, in preparation for the exhibition at the British Museum, and talks on Operation Nightingale (archaeology by wounded service personnel) and on the rescue archaeology of the National Roads Authority of Ireland.

AND WE’VE GOT JUST THREE DAYS TO DIG IT…HENDON TOWN HALL CAR PARK
EXCAVATION, 1978 Andy Simpson

Having looked recently at the Hendon Fuller Street and White Swan Golders Green excavations from the HADAS back catalogue of unpublished excavations, we return once again to Hendon.

Back during the Bank Holiday weekend, 26-28th August 1978, the late Ted Sammes directed another dig in central Hendon to add to those in Burroughs Gardens (1972), Church Terrace (1973/4) and Fuller Street (1974). This was on the perimeter of the far end of car park which lay between the Town Hall and the public gardens of the Grove. As the April 1978 HADAS newsletter recorded, the object was ‘to test the area so that we will have a better idea of whether or not a larger dig should take place before the proposed extension of the Town Hall gets under way in a year or two’s time’. The August 1978 HADAS newsletter further noted ‘This will be a short exploratory dig, directed by Ted Sammes, to assess the archaeological potential of the area prior to a proposed development by Barnet Borough Council’

Hendon Town Hall lies at the centre of the Burroughs, standing on the west side just south-east of the former Grove House site where the Victorians had found some evidence of Roman Hendon; it was originally part of the Grove grounds, as shown in Cook’s map of 1796, sitting just at the SE corner of the grounds. With the foundation stone laid on the 10th October 1900 and a formal opening on 13th November 1901, Hendon Town Hall itself, built in the grounds of Grove House, was completed from designs by T.H. Watson, serving as the offices of the then Hendon Urban District Council, being extended at the back in 1934 when ‘an extensive enlargement was completed’, according to the brochure for the Hendon Borough Show Civics Exhibition 1952. It became Hendon Town Hall in 1932 when Hendon became a Municipal Borough, and now has a modern extension to Middlesex University standing right behind it. The University now leases most of the Town Hall building itself also, except for the council chamber.

GROVE HOUSE AND GROUNDS

Grove House itself, a large stuccoed two-storey building built by 1753, sited to give commanding views westwards towards Harrow and north to Mill Hill, and substantially rebuilt in the 19th century and later, successively, a private nursing home and mental home, was demolished in 1934 following purchase by Hendon Council. The now-levelled site of the house and part of its grounds survive as a small public park called The Grove at the rear of the Fire Station and University, with the original entrance avenue which led directly to the house still extant between University buildings now leading to the park and site of the house. In the Grove grounds in late 1889 in the area of the former Technical College playing fields – the present Middlesex University – were found fragments of Roman pottery including cremation urns, a complete flagon, and building material (including two bricks and flanged roofing tile) and bone fragments.

The Grove House grounds were further reduced by the building of the still-extant adjacent Fire Station in 1914 and the neo-Georgian library in 1929, along with Hendon College of Technology in 1939 – now the main campus of Middlesex University – being extended in 1955 and 1969 (mainly on former Church End Farm land).

Photo – Grove Gardens February 2013,
Grove House stood on the central flat area until 1934.

Further work near the Grove House site took place when in May 1995, the South East London Archaeological Unit undertook a watching brief at the Hendon Campus of Middlesex University, which showed that extensive terracing had removed any possible archaeological evidence, and no dating evidence was recovered from the single feature exposed, a broad hollow. Further archaeological evaluation work at the Hatchcroft development on the Burroughs, Hendon in 2007 (TQ2276 8929, site code HCF07) in five trenches found only post-medieval features and an undated ditch, possibly landscaping associated with the construction of Grove House in 1753.

Also, in November 2002 prior to new construction work, AOC Archaeology opened up four trenches in the former car park site (TQ2275 8940) at Middlesex University down Greyhound Hill opposite the entrance to Sunny Hill Park. The trenches cut through modern tarmac and down through made ground to a depth of two metres, being opened on a Tuesday and backfilled the following morning after nothing was found except the site of a possible pond at the top end of the site and natural gravels cut by possible palaeochannels.

Photo – Extant Brickwork, rear of Grove Gardens, February 2013 – Grove House outbuilding footings?
(Now supporting park steps)

THE TOWN HALL EXCAVATION
Four trenches were dug, at the south and west sides of the car park, lettered A through to D. No original site records, plans or sections appear to have survived, but if anyone knows otherwise we will be delighted to hear from them! Although it was originally thought the dig might continue into September, the three days of the August Bank Holiday were in the end thought enough.

All we have are three annotated copies of a black and white group portrait of five of the diggers taken during backfilling of a trench adjacent to a tall brick boundary wall on 9th September 1978, and four different colour print snapshots taken by the late George Ingram on Sunday 27th August 1978 which concentrate on people rather than features, centered on the deep, narrow trench being backfilled in the later B/W photo. The one photo showing the trench sides indicates a considerable amount of brick rubble in the very dark humic make-up.

There are some references in the annual London Archaeologist excavation round-up and HADAS Committee minutes for June and September 1978, however, along with the original finds.

The site was located at Grid reference NGR TQ22608920 (London HER record no. 081978/00/00. The excavation team included Ted Sammes, Percy Reboul, Jeremy Clynes, Raymond and Christopher Lowe and George Ingram.
It was found that the site had been levelled by twentieth-century dumping; beneath this eighteenth and nineteenth century pottery, clay tobacco pipes and modern field drains were discovered, along with two small conjoining sherds of medieval pottery.

To quote the September 1978 HADAS Committee minutes; ‘Four trenches were opened. One produced nothing but wood blocks for road work (none of which seem to have been retained – AS); one (Trench B) produced Victoriana with one residual piece of medieval pottery (broken in two- later confirmed as London Ware – AS). The others (trenches C and D) produced field drains. A gravel path, shown on the 19th century estate map, was found. Three small yellow bricks, similar to those found on other nearby sites, came from the immediate Town Hall/Grove Gardens area.

There is no mention of whether the natural was reached or not. A later exhibition caption states that the dig ‘came, through lack of evidence, to no definite conclusion. The site was, in fact, virtually sterile.’

Ted Sammes (reclining) supervises operations whilst Jeremy Clynes points at the camera… and is that Percy Reboul with his back to the camera? (George Ingram photo)

Ford Cortina (Mk II?) – and Mum – with only known photo of actual section. (George Ingram photo) THE TRENCHES

Trench A appears to have been dug in four distinct spits in the absence of recognisable contexts in the dump make-up, up to a recorded depth of 60cm. Finds were a piece of building plaster, clay pipe fragments, most of the post-medieval – medieval pottery recovered from the site – mostly refined white wares – and glass (bottle- neck and ‘OXO’ jar), a bone toothbrush handle, a glass marble, a Yale key, a bottle top marked ‘3d Deposit on Bottle’, and a latch-plate from a lock.

An unusual find is a piece of shrapnel, probably 3.7-inch artillery shell, seemingly complete with driving band (which engaged with the rifling of the gun barrel to spin-stabilise the shell) – possibly originating from local Second World War heavy anti-aircraft (AA) sites.

Research kindly undertaken by my colleague Andy Renwick, Curator of Photographs at the RAF Museum, indicates that battery ZW13 was in Mill Hill (TQ 218 945) and ZW14 was in West Hendon (TQ 211 881). Both were equipped with the 3.7″ anti-aircraft gun – an example of which is displayed in the Battle of Britain Hall at the RAF Museum Hendon.
There was also an Anti-Aircraft Flight which was based at RAF Hendon until June 1942. This could have been equipped with 40mm Bofors and these were the guns deployed in the grounds of the Met Police Training School in Aerodrome Road and Sunny Hill Park overlooking RAF Hendon itself.

In March 2013, local resident Dennis Weston kindly provided the following recollection of his time as a teenage fire-watcher at the Town Hall:

‘In 1943, on leaving school, I started work in the wages department of the local council at Hendon Town Hall, working normal office hours of 9am to 5pm. To provide extra assistance to the ARP services, a volunteer group of Town Hall employees, working on a shift basis, provided a group of fire-watchers specifically for the protection of the Town Hall building. A group of six employees commenced duties after normal office hours until the following morning’s normal start time. At various points along the corridors were buckets of water and sand, checked on a daily basis. Once an air raid siren had been heard, routine checks were made to all floors of the building.’

‘On evenings when no air raid sirens had sounded, the Town Hall volunteers had access to a games room with a full sized snooker table and use of a substantial kitchen with equipment to make tea and toast. Should no air raid siren be sounded during the whole night, camp beds were provided in one of the corridors for the volunteers to snatch a few hours’ sleep as they were expected to resume normal duties in the office the next day. A small expense allowance was paid for each night’s duty and for an office junior this was a welcome addition!’

‘My outstanding memory relates to the night of September 1940 when a group of us on duty stood on the roof of the Town Hall and watched in horror the crimson glow of the fires raging in the city of London’

Trench B, dug to a depth of 50cm, yielded two conjoining base sherds of medieval pottery – London Type Ware (LOND) – dated 1080 – 1350 – the only medieval find from the site. In addition there was a considerable quantity of post-medieval pottery, again, mostly refined white wares.

Trench C, dug to 40cm, yielded post-medieval pottery including a complete stoneware inkpot, clay pipe fragments, a glazed tile, and four lengths of modern field drain.

Trench D yielded just two more lengths of modern field drain.

THE FINDS
The finds were fully sorted and recorded using standard MOLAS recording forms.

Selection of finds, including medieval London ware top left, artillery shell fragment (with driving bands) top right, 1942 cup fragment to left of shrapnel. 50 pence piece as scale.

Pottery
Apart from the two pieces of medieval pottery referred to above, the majority of the pottery found was Victorian or more recent – much of it refined white ware (REFW, 1800 – date), of which some has transfer decoration.
Some of it at least appears to be ‘Government issue’ – one sizable piece of plate from Trench A being marked on the base ‘G.VI.R Clokie & Co Ltd 1944’ A cup fragment appears to have (19) 42 on the base. Perhaps these are related to Home Guard or other use – the roof of the Town Hall was certainly a fire-watching post during World War Two.

English Porcelain (ENPO, 1740s onwards) and English Stonewares (ENGS) are also present, plus late tin-glazed ware (TGW) and Post-Medieval Redware (PMR, 1580 – 1900) and Transfer-Printed wares (TPW). Identifiable fragments include an R.White’s stoneware ginger beer bottle.

Clay Pipe
Only trenches A and C yielded any clay pipe remnants – a total of 15 stem fragments and five bowls, or parts thereof. Of the latter, only three were complete enough to be datable – one each of types AO28, 29 and 30 – their date ranges being 1820-1860, 1840-1880 and 1850-1910 respectively. Additionally, one undated stem and spur fragment had a shield design either side of the spur, and an incomplete bowl had a dot design either side of the front seam.

Building Material
This mostly consisted of lengths of modern field drain and some bricks.

Trench C had yielded four 30cm (one foot) field drain lengths, one incomplete. Their average external diameter was 6cm/2.5 inches. A further two similar lengths came from Trench D.

Unstratified from the adjacent Grove Gardens came five yellow bricks, original average length 180mm, depth 37mm, two of them incomplete. These are likely to be hand-made ‘Dutch’ bricks of late sixteenth/ seventeenth century date, of which a number have been found in the Hendon area.

There was also one glazed half-brick, 72mm long and 36mm deep, glazed on face and thickness only. There were also two unstratified pieces of conjoining oolitic limestone, painted on two faces; total length 87mm, thickness 30cm.It is retained along with five unstratified sherds of post-medieval pottery.

The finds are entirely consistent with mid-twentieth century dumping that may include material contemporary with and/or resultant from the demolition of, Grove House. The background residual medieval sherd is hardly surprising in a site so close to proven medieval activity at Burroughs Gardens, Church End Farm and Church Terrace.

References

‘Excavation Round-up 1978’ in London Archaeologist Vol. 3 (10) Spring 1979, p.262

Gillies, S. and Taylor, P. Hendon, Child’s Hill, Golders Green and Mill Hill: A Pictorial History. Phillimore, 1993
J . Clynes et al. Town Trail 1: Hendon. Barnet Libraries Local History Publications, June 1979

Pearce, J. (Ed.) The Last Hendon Farm: The archaeology and history of Church End Farm, HADAS, 2006 Petrie, H. Hendon & Golders Green Past. Historical Publications, 2005

What happened at the Roman Baths? Peter Pickering

We know a lot about what Roman baths were like, since they are ubiquitous among the ruins we visit. We do not see any Romans in them. But there have come down to us some tantalising glimpses of Romans in the baths. One is to be found in the amazingly named ‘Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana.’, which have recently been edited and translated into English by Eleanor Dickey of the University of Exeter. The Hermeneumata contain a phrasebook, like those one can buy for travelling abroad, designed to teach Latin speakers Greek or Greek speakers Latin. Here is a conversation between, it seems, a Roman going to the baths and his slave:

‘Take the towels down to the bath, the strigil, face-cloth, foot-cloth, flask of oil, soap. Go ahead of us, get a place.’
‘Where do you direct it to be? At the public baths, or the private one?’

‘Wherever you order.’

‘Just go ahead; I’m talking to you, the ones who are here.’

‘Let there be hot water for us.’

‘I’ll tell you when we’re coming.’

‘Get up, let’s go.’

‘Do you want to go from here through the portico, on account of the rain?’

‘Do you want to come to the privy?’

‘You reminded me well; my belly urges me to go. Let’s go now.’ ‘Take off your clothes.’

‘Take my shoes, put the clothes together, cover them, watch them well: don’t doze off, on account of the thieves.’ ‘Grab a ball for us: let’s play in the ball court.’

‘I want to practise on the wrestling-ground. Come here, let’s wrestle after a while for a moment.’

‘I don’t know if I can; I stopped wrestling a long time ago. Nevertheless, I shall try if I can.’ ‘I have been tired out easily.’

‘Let’s go into the first room, the tepidarium. Give the bath-keeper coins; get the change.’

‘Anoint me.’

‘I have anointed you.’

‘Rub me.’

‘Come to the sweat-room.’

‘Are you sweating?’

‘I am sweating; I am exhausted.’

‘Let’s go in to the hot pool.’

‘Go down.’

‘Let’s use the dry heat room and go down that way to the hot pool.’

‘Go down, pour hot water over me. Now get out. Throw yourself into the open-air pool.’ ‘Swim!’

‘I swam.’

‘Go over to the basin; pour water over yourself.’

‘Hand me the strigil. Rub me down. Wrap the towels around me. Dry my head and feet. Give me my shoes, put on my shoes. Hand me my underwear, mantle, Dalmatian tunic. Gather up the clothes and all our things. Follow me home, and buy for us from the bath-shop, chopped food and lupins and beans in vinegar.’ ‘You bathed well, may it be well for you.’

Other Societies’ Events Eric Morgan
Monday 8th April. 3pm Barnet and District Local History Society. Church House, Wood Street, Barnet
(opposite museum) ‘The Barnet Foundling Hospital at Monken Hadley” Talk by Yvonne Tomlinson. (See Stephen Brunning’s article in the February Newsletter)

Sunday 14th April. Battlefields Trust Chairman Frank Baldwin will lead a walk over the site of this decisive Wars of the Roses battle. Meet at 11.00am at the Old Monken Public House, High Street, Barnet, EN5 5SU. For further information contact Harvey Watson on 01494 257847 or email harvey.watson@tiscali.co.uk

Tuesday 16th April. 6.30pm Osidge Library, Brunswick Park Road N11 1EY ‘The Fields of Friern’. Talk by Dr Pauline Ashridge (See review of her book in the December Newsletter)

Thursday 25th April. 7.30pm Finchley Society. Christ Church North Finchley N12 (opposite Homebase). (note unusual venue) ‘A Walk round Finchley’ Mike Gee. Refreshments 7.30 pm. Non-members £2.

Monday 29th April. 10.15 am to 5pm UCL Institute of Archaeology ‘You can’t take it with you: Artefacts in Burials from Post-Roman to Modern’. Details from Jackie Keily, Museum of London. 020-7814 5734 jkeily@museumoflondon.org.uk

Wednesday 15th May. 7.30pm Willesden Local History Society, St Mungo’s Centre, 115 Pound Lane NW10 2HV(opposite bus garage) ‘Lost railway stations of Willesden and Environs’ Talk by Cliff Wadsworth.

Friday 17th May. 8pm Enfield Archaeological Society Jubilee Hall, 2 Parsonage Lane\Junction Chase Side Enfield. ‘Skeletons in the Museum of London’ Talk by Jelena Bekvalak. Visitors £1. Refreshments etc 7.30 pm.

Friday 17th May. 6.30pm LAARC Mortimer Wheeler House 46 Eagle Wharf Road N1 7ED ‘Archaeological Archive by Twilight’ Discover some rarely seen finds after dark alongside Curator-led tours, object handling, performances and workshops. Book in advance online at www.museumoflondon.org.uk/events or call 020-7001 9844. £7 (concessions £6).

Friday 17th May 7pm COLAS St Olave’s Parish Hall, Mark Lane EC3. ‘The Crossrail Archaeology Project.’ Jay Carver – Project Archaeologist’ Visitors £2.

Wednesday 22nd May. 7.45pm Friern Barnet and District Local History Society. St John’s Church Hall (next to Whetstone Police Station) Friern Barnet Lane N20. John Donovan Memorial Lecture ‘the 1960s’ Non- members £2 refreshments 7.45 pm and after meeting.

Thursday 31st May. 8pm Finchley Society. Avenue House. Discussion meeting. Topics to be arranged. Non- members £2.

Saturdays (various) in May. ‘Trinity in May’. Trinity Church Centre, 15 Nether Street N12 7NN. Festival of Arts, Music, Literature and Lots More.

Number 503 February 2013 Edited by Andy Simpson

HADAS DIARY
Lectures are held at Avenue House, 17 East End Road, Finchley, N3 3QE, and start promptly at 8 pm,

with coffee/tea and biscuits afterwards. Non-members: £1. Buses 82, 125, 143, 326 & 460 pass nearby and Finchley Central station (Northern Line), is a short walk away.

Tuesday 12 February From Longboat to Warrior; the evolution of the wooden ship Lecture by Eliot Wragg, Thames Discovery Programme (NB- held in the Salon)
Tuesday 12th March: The Railway Heritage Trust Lecture by Andy Savage.

Tuesday 9th April: Nautical Archaeology – past, present and future
Lecture by Mark Beattie-Edwards, Programme Director, Nautical Archaeology Society. Tuesday 14th May 2013: 10,000 years of History Beneath your Feet: the Bankside foreshore Lecture by Dr Fiona Haughey
Tuesday 8th October: Brunel’s Tunnel under the Thames

Lecture by Robert Hulse – Director of the Brunel Museum
Tuesday 12th November: Lions on Kunulua – excavations of Early Bronze and Iron Age periods at Tell Tayinat, Hatay, Turkey Lecture by Dr Fiona Haughey

Our “long weekend”, 2013 Jim Nelhams

HADAS long weekends have for a few years been rather longer, and our trip in 2013 is a total of 5 days, running from Sunday 15th September and returning home on Thursday 19th. We will be based at Lee Wood (Best Western) Hotel in Buxton in the Derbyshire Peak District, an area which HADAS does not seem to have visited before.

We expect to visit Stoke on Trent, the “plague village” of Eyam, and Matlock Spa, including the Heights of Abraham, and are examining a number of other options. If you have any other suggestions, please talk to Jim or Jo Nelhams or Don Cooper (contact details on back page of newsletter).
Pick up points will as usual be Barnet, Whetstone, Finchley, Hendon, Golders Green and Temple Fortune. Times are not yet known until we confirm our en route coffee stop.
We managed to hold prices last year, but unfortunately both hotel and coach prices have risen this year so the proposed cost will be £450 per person sharing a double/twin room and £495 for a single.
These prices are based on a group of 36 people. Because the prices have risen, we need to know that we have enough interest to make the trip viable.
With this newsletter, you will find a form about the trip. If you want to come, please complete it and return the form to Jim Nelhams with your deposit, not later than 15th March. Cheques payable to HADAS please. Cheques will not be banked until we know we have enough support.
We hope you can join us for what we expect to be another enjoyable trip.
Thanks, but no tanks Andy Simpson

Last month’s newsletter featured recent resistivity work by HADAS at Martin Primary School, East Finchley.
The main entrance corridor of the school features original Finchley Urban District Council architect’s plans for the school, and historic photographs. One of these seemingly dates to the late First World War period, showing the entire school grouped in front of the main entrance (this photo being reproduced on the first page of the January/February 2013 Finchley Society Newsletter), and what appears to be a classic Great War British tank in the background. Or not. When I showed this to RAF Museum colleague Alan Wicks, a member of the Friends of Bovington Tank Museum (http://www.tankmuseum.org/), he pointed out a few problems. Using the people standing on top as a scale, for one thing it isn’t long enough, and the forward raised housing is too square and too big – and should slope at the back. It could perhaps be a mock-up, perhaps in wood, and produced for recruiting or ‘Tank Bank Week’ fundraising events run by the National War Savings Committee. Anyone out there know more of tanks in Great War Finchley or Barnet?
Publication Backlog Andy Simpson

Further to last year’s articles on 1970s HADAS digs in Fuller St, Hendon, and the White Swan, Golders Green, I am now working on the Hendon Town Hall dig directed by Ted Sammes over the August Bank Holiday weekend, 1978, assisted by the Sunday morning Avenue House gang with the finds processing. There are no extant site notes or drawings, just a few informal snapshots, mostly by the late George Ingrams, and just a handful of references in HADAS committee minutes. Finds are varied – a single

residual sherd of medieval pottery, clay pipes, and much 18th- 19th century pottery, including part of a Government Issue plate dated 1944 and even a fragment of shrapnel from an artillery shell, presumably from anti-aircraft fire.

Margaret Maher 1938-2012 – a personal tribute by Myfanwy Stewart

It was with great sadness that Margaret’s friends heard that she had passed away on the 15th December 2012 after years of illness. She had fought ill health with an indomitable spirit that came as no surprise to all who knew her.

We first met when HADAS started the Mesolithic excavation of West Heath, Hampstead, under the direction of the late Daphne Lorimer, and we stayed to the close in 1981. In 1977 the excavation of the West Heath Spring site, a boggy area to the south-east, was made possible when Margaret’s husband William (always “Billy” to her) provided a HY-Mac excavator to dig out the first 1.6. metres of the bog. Samples from a deeper pit were taken by the late M.Girling and J. Grieg and evidence of five thousand years of environmental data were obtained from the beetle and pollen evidence. Sadly Billy was to die prematurely and Margaret was left a widow with 4 children.

After West Heath, we both went as full time students to the Institute of Archaeology, UCL and successfully graduated. We dug on the Mesolithic site on Hengistbury Head and then West Heath was re-opened by HADAS in 1984 under Margaret’s direction.

Margaret proved to be a very able director for the 3 year excavation. Extremely thorough, she ran a ‘tight ship’ which brought out the best in the diggers. Her knowledge of flint knapping and typology was prodigious and she was always eager to teach all who took part. She generated enthusiasm and the site had a very happy atmosphere.

My usually reticent mother, who progressed from tea making to writing up the finds ledger, said that working on the site “was one of the happiest times of my life” and that Margaret was “a real worker”. It was very gratifying when UCL acknowledged the excavation and allowed their undergraduates to work there as part of their required excavation experience.

Much humour came from the crowd of people who inevitably came to watch and comment from behind the fence. A memorable moment came when a mounted police officer called to Margaret “I am looking for a man”. “Aren’t we all” she jokingly shouted back.

The last time we excavated together was at Culverwell, the Mesolithic shell midden on the Isle of Portland, owned and directed by Susann Palmer. Overlooking the sea, the site was a complete contrast to West Heath and added to our experience of the Mesolithic.

The last time I saw Margaret she knew she did not have long to live. She faced the inevitable with immense courage and dignity. The large congregation at her funeral requiem mass showed how well she was regarded and included members of HADAS and former UCL graduates.

Another side of Margaret was shown in the order of service booklet which referred to her “eclectic taste in music”, some of which was played at her funeral. Included also was a selection from her collection of “sayings, oddments and poetry that she particularly liked or which touched a chord”. She really was “one of a kind” and will be greatly missed by her friends. Sincere and deepest sympathy is sent to her children and family.

Ironbridge Trip – Day 4

BRIDGNORTH Kevin McSharry

Day 4 of this year’s HADAS excursion to Shropshire was a real delight despite the inclement weather. It began with Bridgnorth, thence to the atmospheric pipe factory of Broseley and finally to Cosford to view the RAF Museum there.
Bridgnorth’s name comes from a bridge over the Severn, a little to the north of where the town stands. It is one town with two very distinct parts: The High Town which stands on a cliff and overlooks the River Severn; and the Low Town on the west bank of the Severn. The two parts are connected by the Bridgnorth Funicular or Castle Hill Railway, said to be the steepest inland funicular railway in Britain.

Our guided tour began in the windswept Sainsbury’s car park but with one or two stops we hastened to the historic centre of Bridgnorth High Town, which we entered by Northgate the only surviving gate of the original five. Northgate houses the Bridgnorth Museum, which had been opened for our Hadasian party. The Museum was accessed by a narrow, steep stone staircase. The Museum’s shape was dictated by its location on the Northgate cum wall of Bridgnorth. Thus it was one long narrow room crammed with a fascinating collection of historic artefacts telling the story of Bridgnorth over the centuries. Members of the Bridgnorth & District Historical Society were on hand to answer the many questions posed to them.

Much of historic High Town Bridgnorth we see today dates from the seventeenth century, as the town was a severe casualty of the English Civil War (1641-1649). The fateful day was the 29th March 1646 when Parliamentary forces attacked the town which had declared for the King. Bridgnorth’s motto is “Fidelitas Urbis Salus Regius” (In the Town’s loyalty lies the King’s Safety). In the ensuing melee much of the town was fired and a goodly portion of St. Leonard’s Church destroyed, by explosion.

A hop, skip and a jump from Northgate was St. Leonard’s Church approached by a narrow picturesque street. As with St. Mary’s in Shrewsbury, St. Leonard’s is now under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. Its location which is circular is a delight and known as St. Leonard’s Close. St. Leonard’s is a Norman foundation and some of its interesting features include lovely windows and a pulpit carved, as an angel with a trumpet, in wood.

Our tour wended its way to Bridgnorth’s 17th century Town Hall (part of which was once a court of justice), a half-timbered building standing over the arched market area, that dominates the High Street. The Town Hall, accessed by a wooden staircase, is a gem. The Council chamber, wooden panelled with interesting stained glass windows is a palimpsest of the Town’s history since the 17th century. Our tour of the High Town concluded at the classically designed church of St. Mary Magdalene. Designed by whom? None other than Thomas Telford with whom I associated things

industrial and not this light-filled beautiful, spacious building with soaring windows. St. Mary’s, despite its classical design, stands on an 11th century foundation and, unlike St. Leonard’s, is the centre of an active and vibrant parish.

Leaving St. Mary’s we hastened to the Castle Hill Railway, approached by a narrow walkway with stunning views over the Severn and beyond. Views said by Charles I to be the finest in the Kingdom.

What fun it is to ride on unusual forms of transport. The funicular railway is one such form. The railway, initially operated by water, is now powered by electricity.

Below – going down! – Photo by Andy Simpson.

The railway operated two cars on parallel tracks. Connected by steel cables, the carriages serve to counter-balance each other, as one rises to the top station the other runs to the bottom station. The railway (opened in July 1892) is a testament to Victorian entrepreneurial and engineering skills.

Two of Bridgnorth’s most famous sons are Francis Moore of “Old Moore’s Almanac” fame and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Shakespearian actor and star of stage and screen. Their names evoked those mystic cards of memory of my childhood as the Almanac was always in our house, usually bought at the door from an itinerant pedlar; and Sir Cedric is remembered from the black & white (and some colour) films shown at the matinee performances at the Classic Cinema, alas now no more. I remember more vividly his son, the actor Edward Hardwicke, a grandson of Bridgnorth, who played Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Holmes.

Once our descent, from the High Town to the Low Town had been accomplished we embarked on the coach at Lavington Hole to journey to historic Broseley.

BROSELEY PIPE MUSEUM Don Cooper

And so to visit the Broseley pipe museum; the museum is on the site of one of the last clay pipe factories in Britain. It belonged to the Southorn family. Having opened in 1880 as Crown Pipeworks, it closed in 1957 and was left as it was until becoming a museum in 1992. (The last pipe-making factory to close in Britain was John Pollock & Co. of Manchester, which closed in 1992). The village of Broseley was renowned for clay pipe makers, the first one being recorded in 1590. Such was the popularity of clay pipe smoking that what was once a cottage industry became an industrial factory business.

At its peak in the 18th century Broseley was known world-wide for the quality of its clay pipes and there were a number of factories in the village. Smoking a “Broseley”

was the height of fashion. However, by the late 19th century clay pipe smoking was in decline as cigarettes became more popular. To meet this challenge the various

companies consolidated and eventually only William Southorn & Co., which had started in 1823, was left.

As a final fling they diversified into making china dolls, pipes for children to blow bubbles with etc., but gave up the struggle in 1957 when Harry Southorn died.

We were very fortunate to be able to arrange for Rex M Key (one of the very last clay pipe makers) to give us a demonstration of how clay pipes had been made in the factory. In summary, the clay (which often came up from Cornwall) was washed in tubs to remove imperfections. Then it was worked like dough to remove the air and was rolled into a rough pipe shape and a wire pushed through the stem to make the hole. Next it was put in a two part steel mould to form the bowl properly, the mould was clamped and the wire pushed through to complete the hole for the smoke to reach the smoker. Once dried, it was trimmed and excess clay removed, put in saggars (ceramic boxes for holding products put in kilns, which could be stacked neatly and reused) and fired in the kiln. The kiln at this factory held 75,000 pipes, and firing and cooling took four days in all. After the clay pipes were fired, they were sometimes polished and burnished, and had the tips dipped in a waxy substance so that the smoker’s lips did not stick to the clay. The pipes were packed carefully in straw or wood shavings (as they are very fragile!), boxed and dispatched all around the world.

Clay pipes came in all shapes and sizes. Essentially they were used as advertising for a whole host of organisations; pubs, clubs, societies, and often commemorated individual people and events. The smallest pipes were known as “cutties”, church warden pipes were 20” (50cms) long, and the longest pipes were up to 36” (91cms).

Below – Rex at work – photo by Andy Simpson

Rex is a knowledgeable clay pipe enthusiast (he has a personal collection of 14,000 pipes) and he gave us a wonderful demonstration on how to make clay pipes supported by an excellent commentary – thanks Rex. As one of the last clay pipe makers, he says he is inundated with orders from organisations wanting clay pipes to advertise their organisations.

After the demonstration (which was done in two groups so that everyone could see Rex at work) we toured the rest of the remains of the factory, left as if the workforce had just gone home for the day, and viewed workbenches, samples of moulds, types of pipes as well as videos of pipe-making in the past. As clay pipes were virtually a disposable item hence “a pipe and pint for a penny”, with frequent changes of designs, they are an important tool, when found in context, in helping to date archaeological finds. The pipe museum, a time capsule of what the working conditions were like in the declining years of this industry, was a grim place to work, full of dust, but a fascinating gem of a place to visit.

Warning – Contains Aeroplanes! Andy Simpson

After a most enjoyable visit to Broseley, we moved on to the Royal Air Force Museum, Cosford, which is the ‘Midlands Outstation’ of the Hendon museum. This is a long-established collection; the writer of this note remembers with affection 1970s Sunday afternoon drives out to what was then the Cosford Aerospace Museum, long before it was formally joined with the museum at Hendon.

In those days, when the aircraft there were viewed as one of the RAF’s former ‘Regional Collections’ of historic aircraft, for 50 pence you got museum admission, duplicated guidebook, AND a car sticker! Even today, admission remains free.

This is a large site to one side of what remains an operational airfield and tri-service training base – see http://www.raf.mod.uk/rafcosford/

The museum site occupies five large buildings – a reception building, upper pair of hangars, lower hangar, the vast, lottery-funded National Cold War Exhibition building (‘NCWE’), and the building where we started our visit, the Michael Beetham Conservation Centre (‘MBCC’), named after a long-serving Chairman of the RAF Museum Trustees, a wartime bomber pilot. Our guide for the tour of the centre was MBCC Manager Tim Wallis, also ex-RAF. Tim talked us through the conservation and restoration role of the MBCC, with particular reference to the on-going long-term restoration projects on two wartime RAF bombers – the Vickers Wellington, after 40 years display at Hendon, and the Handley Page Hampden wreck recovered from its Russian forest crash site in the early 1990s and requiring total rebuild whilst retaining as much as possible of the original structure. Also being worked on was the Hawker Siddeley Kestrel, an early development version of the late lamented Harrier Jump Jet that recently fell victim to government cuts. Tim’s team of technicians and apprentices have also been heavily involved in the reassembly of the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft, a derivative of the Comet airliner, seen parked outside in the final stages of assembly following its move by road from Kemble airfield in Gloucestershire – Cosford’s relatively short runway means not all RAF Museum acquisitions can be flown in due to their size and weight.

After this most informative tour, we were free to explore the rest of the site. Many concentrated on the NCWE with its collection of Cold War artefacts including tanks and armoured vehicles as well as aircraft. It is the only place in the world displaying all three nuclear–capable ‘V Bombers’ – Victor, Valiant and Vulcan. See http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/cosford/

Below – Cosford’s De Havilland Mosquito and Avro Lincoln (Photo by Andy Simpson)

Others of the group found their way to the hangars containing the extensive collection of research and development aircraft, including the ill-fated TSR2, and warplanes, including Mosquito and Lincoln bombers, the latter a development of the immortal Lancaster. The weather was perfect and after a good stroll round we headed back to the hotel.

Site visit to the Bucklersbury House Excavation Bill Bass

The visit was organised by the City of London Archaeological Society, on the 12th Dec 2012. As it was popular the group was split into a morning and afternoon time-slot, this report is of the afternoon session.

The site borders Queen Victoria St to the north (near Bank station) and takes in not only the area of the now demolished Bucklersbury House, but also other properties to the south. Our party entered via the north-west entrance, where we were met by Sadie Watson, the Project Officer for Museum of London Archaeology. After signing-in, the first thing to strike you was the massive scale of the site, 5-10m deep in places and covering a wide area, lots of big construction plant, piling machines and staff in high visibility vests. It was, we were told, currently the biggest privately- financed development in Europe. After walking down to the site cabin we were given a briefing on the site by Sadie.

This part of the City between Moorgate and Bank was bisected north to south by the River Walbrook which created the upper Walbrook Valley. This area has long been known for its archaeological importance.

In the early 1950s, Professor Grimes discovered and excavated the Temple of Mithras (whose peripatetic fate will be more fully reported in due course). In more recent times there have been several high-profile digs associated with the Walbrook Valley including No1 Poultry – which overlooks our site just to the north, Drapers Gardens and 8-10 Moorgate. In fact the excavations at 8-10 Moorgate and of Bucklersbury House were being dug concurrently for a time, those at Moorgate have just been completed (early December).

The earliest signs of Roman occupation in the immediate area came from No1 Poultry – a timber drain of 47AD. In this period the Walbrook would have been navigable by boat. As noted in the other sites above, the Walbrook and its valley became increasingly industrialised, post-holes, piles, revetments and the like saw the river channelled and moved for various purposes. At Bucklersbury, a system of plank-lined drains and wells have been recorded across the area, posts, and groupings of posts, may indicate a substantial mill and associated mill-race being built over the river at the north of the site.

Eventually as water levels dropped and the Walbrook became silted up, timber-framed buildings were erected over the line of the river around the late 1st to early 2nd century. Built mostly of oak they would have been founded on base-plates supported on piles with vertical beams slotted into mortice joints, then in-filled with wattle and daub walls. Access to the buildings could be seen with excavation of fence-lined alleyways. Preservation of these wooden frames and fence features was described as ‘excellent’.

After a series of dumping and levelling layers in the later Roman period, the area was re-modelled with buildings of ragstone lining the east of the Walbrook, together with a shrine, walls and floors possibly leading to, or associated with, a temple precinct – The Temple of Mithras. Indeed remains of the foundations of the Temple of Mithras not removed when it was dismantled in 1954 were rediscovered during early work on the site, but were reburied, as it is now a ‘Scheduled Ancient Monument’.

A tessellated floor was recorded and lifted, the floor was partially made with recycled materials – hypocaust tiles and similar, so not top-notch but a step-up from a beaten earth or chalk floor, for instance. (In 1869 a superb mosaic was discovered in the region of Bucklersbury).

It would appear that the Walbrook is the place to dig as at Drapers Gardens there was a wonderful array of finds, which were passed around the table. These included a small polished Neolithic hand- axe – found in a Roman context where somebody had tried to drill a hole through it to act as a pendant. Another star find was a small amber amulet shaped like a gladiator’s helmet. From the Walbrook Discovery Programme blog:

“At a little over 1 cm across this was a great spot on site and could easily have been missed. The helmet has a large crest and has a lattice work of engraved lines on the face which forms a stylised representation of a visor. It is perforated through the crest for suspension. This type of helmet was worn by a murmillo type of gladiator who was armed with a sword, shield, helmet, greaves and padding on his right arm. Normally paired off against a thraex these gladiators were amongst the most popular of the imperial Roman period and would undoubtedly have competed at the Londinium Amphitheatre at Guildhall Yard”.

Some recently excavated wax writing-tablets in excellent, water-logged condition, were also seen. The wax has disappeared but the impressed writing can often be seen with scientific and photographic techniques. One from No.1 Poultry describes the sale of a female slave – Fortunata. A host of other finds we saw included copper items – pendants, brooches, hinges, coins, buckles and a tabard for holding your chain-mail together. Iron keys and arrowheads were also seen.

We were soon issued with our own hi-vis ‘safety-kit’ and retracing our steps from the west to a viewing platform on the east of the site off the Walbrook street. Most of

the archaeology survives only down the east side of the site due to truncation by the 1950s office development. We were looking through and over massive modern day

steel piling and revetments, this was needed as the site was so deep and directly behind us was St Stephen’s Church, whose medieval 15th century foundations

needed to be kept in check! A new entrance to Bank station will be built in this area and there are plans to re-instate the line of the Roman Road of Watling Street

across the site here. Looking down we could see many of the 50-60 archaeologists working away at the deep black deposits of the 2nd century Walbrook. They are

surrounded by Roman timber posts – of the possible two-storey mill together with other walls, wells and drains, in between was their modern concrete equivalents. As an aside, many of the Roman timbers may be recycled as an ‘art instillation’ in the new building, which will also include a publicly accessible new display of the Temple of Mithras. It was a fascinating and impressive sight to see such a large chunk of well-preserved archaeology being excavated in the City of London.

The site is being developed by McAlpine to be the European HQ of Bloomberg LP. Many thanks to Sophie Jackson, Director Design and Development and Sadie

Watson of MOLA, for giving up so much of her time, and to Rose Baillie for organising the visit. The dig can be followed on the blog here:

(http://walbrookdiscovery.wordpress.com/) where more info and further finds are to be found.

The Foundling Hospital in Hadley Report by Stephen Brunning.
I recently joined the Barnet U3A and attended my first meeting and lecture on 3rd January. The lecture was given by exhibition curator Yvonne Tomlinson.

The Foundling Hospital was set up by Thomas Coram (1668-1751) who was appalled by the plight of London’s abandoned children. The hospital received its charter on 17th October 1739 and became the first children’s charity. A building to house the children opened in Bloomsbury in 1745. There were 376 governors who included royalty and painter William Hogarth. Women were not allowed to be governors. Hogarth donated paintings to the hospital and composer George Frideric Handel gave concerts to raise much needed funds.

On admission the children were given a token with a number on it which they had to wear at all times. They were also baptised in a new name to protect the mother’s identity. The hospital became the legal guardian to the children who placed them in apprenticeships at age 12 and supervised the placements until they were 24 years old (male) and 21 (female). Boys were apprenticed into a variety of trades and the girls in domestic service. Not all children were accepted and those who were too sick were turned away. On the first day of the “General Reception” (GR – 2nd June 1756 to 31st March 1760) over 117 children arrived. The numbers became so great that branch hospitals were required. These were established at Ackworth, Aylesbury, Barnet, Chester and Shrewsbury.

A remarkable Barnet woman by the name of Mrs Prudence West suggested in May 1760 and again in September 1762 that a branch hospital be set up in Monken Hadley. She felt the country air would be good for the children. It finally opened on 19th December 1762 with Mrs West as Manager. The Matron and her assistant were Martha & Sarah Cullarne who received an annual salary of £15 and £10 respectively.

Mrs West recognised the need for the children to have a good diet and, like the children in London and the other branch hospitals, they were also given smallpox inoculations. Despite this, the death rate was shocking by modern standards. 42% of the children at Monken Hadley died although this was good when compared with the 63% before GR, 70% during GR and 45% after GR in London. Mrs West treated minor ailments herself and tried to help the sick children along with the nurses. This no doubt helped, as they had the third lowest death rate.

The Monken Hadley hospital finally closed its doors on 19th March 1768 and the children were collected by caravan. Some were deemed too sick to return to London and sent to a local nurse instead. Following her challenge to the hospital governors when the hospital closed, about the high price of goods, Mrs West was reimbursed 40/- to “keep her quiet” as Yvonne put it! Mrs West was the only woman managing an outreach hospital. In 1927 the hospital in Bloomsbury closed, and the children were moved to a building in Redhill. A site was found in Berkhamsted and a new hospital was built in 1935 which survives today as Ashlyns School. Parts of the original building still stands around a playground in Coram’s Fields, Bloomsbury, where adults are only admitted if accompanied by a child.

References

The Foundling Museum website, 2011: http://www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk/ (accessed 3rd January 2013).

This talk complements the exhibition at Barnet Museum and the Foundling Voices exhibition which runs from 1st December 2012 to 28th February 2013; although after 14th January the original objects will be replaced by facsimiles. The exhibition will travel to Hendon, East Barnet and Chipping Barnet libraries until mid-April 2013.

The Mythology of a Pharaoh: Akhenaten, deformed or divine? Lucia Gahlin
Report on January’s lecture by Sigrid Padel

The reign of Akhenaten, 1352 – 1336 BC, stands out as an extraordinary chapter in Egyptian history and archaeology. It has attracted many theories and interpretations. Lucia Gahlin, who lectures in Egyptology at Bristol and Exeter, gave a lively, well-argued and illustrated account of what we actually know about him and his time.

Akhenaten broke with the long established ideas and traditions of religion and kingship in Egypt. Amun-Ra had long been the principal god in the Egyptian pantheon. His temple at Luxor is still one of the most impressive buildings ever constructed. Akhenaten replaced Amun-Ra by the Aten, the solar disc, making this the sole god, thus introducing a form of monotheism.

Akhenaten was the son of Amunhotep III and Queen Tiye. We know nothing of his childhood. Since his elder brother Thutmose died young, he was destined to rule as Amunhotep IV. But by the fifth year of his reign a significant change had taken place. He chose to be called Akhenaten. (“Akh”- spirit of ”Aten” – the sun god). His wife, Nefertiti, became Nefernefarnuaten. Though, at the beginning of his reign, Akhenaten had built a temple to the Aten at Karnak next to the temple of Amun-Ra, he soon decided to move his capital from Memphis to Amarna, a city he founded on a new site further south. This was laid out orientated towards two hills between which the sun rises on certain days of the year. He and Nefertiti had themselves portrayed beneath the sun’s disc with rays emanating from it towards the royal pair, creating an image of a special link with this god. It seems that Akhenaten saw himself as a God-King. The art of this period differs from the norm established in Egypt during the preceding centuries, using more sinuous lines, emphasising sexuality and the closeness of Akhenaten’s relationship with his wife and their six daughters. Statues of the king show him as rather effeminate.

The changes introduced by Akhenaten were not to last. He was succeeded by Smenkhare, who died soon after. This brought the nine-year-old Tutankhamun, formerly known as Tutankhaten, to the throne. Early in his reign El-Amarna was abandoned as was the cult introduced by Akhenaten. It is unclear what happened to his body and all his cartouches were erased from buildings and statues. His name, like those of his successors Smenkhkare and Tutankhamun, possibly his sons, are omitted from the King List of all pharaohs from about 1250 BC.

It is not surprising that this pharaoh has been heavily mythologised. The portrayal of Akhenaten’s body in statues and frescoes is seen by some as typical of homosexuality, bisexuality or linked to various conditions such as Marfan’s syndrome. He has been seen as a pacifist, not “smiting his enemies” as other pharaohs were seen to have done. Frescoes of this period seem to emphasize birds and flowers rather than warfare. But there are depictions of Akhenaten killing birds and Nefertiti in an aggressive pose. Sir Flinders Petrie who was responsible for the excavations of El-

Amarna saw Akhenaten as the first monogamist ruler, an idea that would have been appealing to his contemporaries. There is no real evidence for any of these interpretations. In judging the past it is more important to look at what is really known and to acknowledge that what is read into the past
often merely reflects the attitudes of the authors of these theories.

OTHER SOCIETIES’ EVENTS compiled by Eric Morgan

Friday 22 February, 7.30pm. Edmonton Hundred Historical Society, jointly with Enfield Society, Charity School, Church St, Edmonton N9. Enfield’s Railway History, Pt. 1 – The Lea Valley, Southbury & Enfield Town Lines – talk by David Cockle. Visitors £1. Please note correction to this venue.

Sunday 3 March, 10.30am. Heath & Hampstead Society. Heroes and Villains – The History of the Heath as we know it. Meet at the Flagstaff, Whitestone Pond. Walk led by Thomas Radice. Lasts approx. 2 hours. Donation £3.00.

Tuesday 5–Sunday 17 March. Hendon Library, The Burroughs, Hendon NW4 4BQ. The Barnet Foundling Hospital, Monken Hadley, 1762-68. Exhibition- a continuation of the exhibition at Barnet Museum, which runs until 20 February (see January and this Newsletter). Then on to East Barnet Library, Tues 19–Sat 30 March, and then Tues 2–Sun 14 April at Chipping Barnet Library.

Tuesday 5 March, 8pm. St Albans & Herts Architectural & Historical Society, St Albans School, Abbey Gateway, St Albans AL3 4HB. Tudor Hertfordshire. Talk by Daphne Knott.

Mon 11 March, 3pm. Barnet Museum & Local History Society, Church House, Wood St, Barnet (opposite Museum). Charles & Mary Lamb – talk by Helen Walton.

Wed 13 March, 2.30 – 4pm. Mill Hill Historical Society, Trinity Church, The Broadway, NW7. The History of Harrods (preceded by AGM) -talk by Mrs M. Wright.

Wed 13 March, 7.45pm. Hornsey Historical Society, Union Church Hall, Corner Ferme Park Road/Weston Park, N8 9PX. The Building of St Paul’s Cathedral – talk by Neil Houghton. Visitors £1.50

Friday 15 March, 7.30pm. Wembley History Society, 977, Harrow Road, Sudbury, HA0 2SF (opposite Black Horse Pub) – talk by Len Snow, author & historian. Visitors £2. NB- different venue.

Friday, 15 March, 8pm (refreshments & sales from 7.30). Enfield Archaeological Society, Jubilee Hall, 2 Parsonage Lane, junction Chase Side, Enfield EN2 0AJ. Old & New Finds of the Coin Collection of Verulamium Museum – talk by David Thorold. Visitors £1

Saturday 16 March 2013. LAMAS 50th Annual Conference of London Archaeologists Weston Theatre, Museum of London Morning session – recent work; Afternoon session – 50 Years of London Archaeology: Past, Present and Future. Tickets booked pre-1st March: £10.00, £15.00 after this date.
Cheque payable to LAMAS and SAE to Jon Cotton, c/o Department of Archaeological Collections & Archive, Museum of London, 150 London Wall, EC2Y 5HN

With thanks to this month’s contributors; Bill Bass; Stephen Brunning; Don Cooper; Kevin McSharry; Eric Morgan; Jim Nelhams; Sigrid Padel; Myfanwy Stewart.

No. 502 JANUARY 2013 Edited by Mary Rawitzer

Can I take the opportunity to wish all our readers a very happy and healthy New Year. A shorter newsletter this month, but please keep contributions flowing.

HADAS DIARY 2013

All Lectures are held at Avenue House, 17 East End Road, Finchley, N3 3QE, and start promptly at 8.00 pm, with coffee /tea and biscuits afterwards. Non-members welcome (£1.00). Buses 82, 125, 143, 326 & 460 pass nearby and Finchley Central Station (Northern line) is a short walk away.

Tuesday 8th January 2013: The Reign of Akhenaten Lecture by Lucia Gahlin

Tuesday 12th: From Longboat to Warrior: the evolution of the wooden ship.

Lecture by Eliott Wragg, Thames Discovery Programme.

Tuesday 12th March: The Railway Heritage Trust

Lecture by Andy Savage.

Tuesday 9th April: Nautical Archaeology – past, present and future

Lecture by Mark Beattie-Edwards, Programme Director, Nautical Archaeology Society.

Tuesday 14th May 2013: 10,000 years of History Beneath your Feet: the Bankside foreshore

Lecture by Dr Fiona Haughey

Tuesday 8th October: Brunel’s Tunnel under the Thames

Lecture by Robert Hulse – Director of the Brunel Museum

Tuesday 12th November: Lions on Kunulua – excavations of Early Bronze and Iron Age periods at Tell Tayinat, Hatay, Turkey Lecture by Dr Fiona Haughey.

THE TOMB OF A GOD by Tim Wilkins

At the end of November 2012 I joined a group of archaeologists and Egyptologists under Dr. Stephen Harvey, of the University of Chicago, to study at the ancient Egyptian site of Abydos, in what is now the central Egyptian region of Sohag. There are many elements to this huge and varied site including Dr. Harvey’s own excavations at the 50-metre square pyramid of Ahmose, and a series of 14 boat burials (see note 1). For me, however, the highlight was a visit to the site of Umm al Ga’ab in the low western desert, nearly at the mountain escarpment that marks the edge of the high desert. Here the German Archaeological Institute under Gunter Dreyer has been excavating a large number of royal tombs from the First Dynasty (3100 – 2900 BC), a number of tombs of the Pre-dynastic period around 3500 BC, and a cemetery from the Naqada period dating back to 4000 BC. The evidence from the Pre-dynastic tombs, covering a number of Kings including the Scorpion King, pushes back our knowledge of the earliest Egyptian kings by several hundred years.

One of the most interesting of the First Dynasty tombs is that of Djer, the third king of this dynasty, who reigned for 41 years from 3049 – 3008 BC. The tomb is a rectangular mud-brick structure sunk into the desert sand and now completely empty except for mud-brick internal buttresses and some statuary niches (see Figure 1 and photo 1). It was originally roofed with cedar beams. The inside of the tomb has been burned dark red from having been set alight in the First Intermediate period, a period from 2180 – 2055 BC when civil disruption, fighting, internal disorder and destruction wracked the country (plus ça change!).

Around the main chamber are 338 subsidiary shaft tombs containing the King’s servants and administrators who were killed and buried at the same time so they could continue to serve him in the after-life. In other tombs have been found mummified hunting dogs, and even lions, so the King can continue his favourite pastime of lion-hunting, and other pastimes are catered for by women of the royal harem.

The tomb was first excavated in the Middle Kingdom (11th – 13th dynasty, 2055 – 1650 B.C.) by pharaohs looking for the tomb of the god Osiris. With this tomb they decided they had found it, and placed in it a recumbent statue of the god impregnating Isis who has taken the form of a bird (see note 4), the remains of the plinths of which can still be seen. The statue is now in the Cairo museum. Once the tomb had been identified as that of Osiris it became a place of reverence and pilgrimage for a further two thousand years. When these pilgrims came to the tomb they left offerings in earthenware pots, a practice that has given the site its modern name of Umm al Ga’ab, “Mother of Pots” in Arabic. It is estimated that there are now the remains of between 8 million and 10 million pots, and somebody has the job of analysing and recording these by age, material, style etc.

We were very fortunate in being the last people from outside the dig team to see this tomb. The surrounding subsidiary tombs were already back-filled with sand to the tops of the mud-brick shafts (see photo 2), and in the first week of December the main chamber was back-filled, with just a sand mound marking its existence. This is to conserve it – the mud-brick is very friable and if left exposed would soon deteriorate under the sun and wind, turning to dust. So the tomb of King Djer and the god Osiris is once more under the Western Desert, and may stay that way for generations to come.

Note 1: After excavation and analysis, the wooden boats were left in their mud-brick surrounds and back-filled with sand, as lifting and preserving them was deemed too difficult and expensive. So they too are back under the sands of the desert.

Note 2: Early hints of the development of phonetic writing.

It is usually thought that writing developed in Mesopotamia, but Gunter Dreyer has found in the Naqada cemetery, and we were able to examine, small 1 cm square ivory tags with proto-phonetic writing on them. Not many of these can yet be read, but some can be interpreted through their similarity to later hieroglyphs, reading for example “From the Eastern lands” and “ From the Western lands” indicating that they were used to identify the source and perhaps content of goods containers – maybe recording who had paid their tributes and taxes.

Note 3: Is this where pyramids started?

The tombs of the early kings were covered by a sand tumulus and, according to Dreyer, there was a problem with this tumulus being blown away by the desert winds, so by the time of Djer the tomb was supported with low mud-brick walls. However this did nothing to stop the predations of animals, so they then built a larger surrounding perimeter wall. However this hid the tumulus from view, so they added a second higher level to it in a step, and by the Third Dynasty this had developed into a step pyramid – and pyramid building was under way.

Note 4: the legend of Osiris and Isis

Osiris was the oldest son of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut. Isis was his sister and wife. Osiris’s brother Seth wanted his kingdom (the underworld) and killed Osiris, cut his body into pieces and scattered them around Egypt. Isis travelled all over Egypt looking for the pieces and collected them all back together, except for one – his penis. So she created a new one for him, reaffixed it, and with a magic incantation brought him back to life long enough for him to impregnate her with their son Horus.

Figure 1: Plan of Djer tomb with surrounding subsidiary shaft tombs

Photo 1: Main chamber of tomb of Djer

Photo 2: Subsidiary shaft tombs now backfilled with sand and covered.

HADAS CHRISTMAS PARTY by Jim Nelhams

A large number of HADAS members and their guests assembled at Avenue House for our Christmas Party. Some 48 attended. Four people were unable to come, so we could have had over 50, a large number for any HADAS event.

It was so nice to see several of the more senior members, particularly Phyllis Fletcher, who came in her wheelchair, Joan Wrigley and Rosalie Ivens. Plenty of time was allowed for them and others to catch up on news.

A short table quiz was provided with questions and pictures of personalities from the 1950s. Apologies to those who might have expected something Roman but we could not go back that far for photographs. The winners found themselves presented with a HADAS mug containing a chocolate Father Christmas.

Food and drink was provided by Avenue House, with manager Malcolm slaving away in the kitchen. Added to this were two magnificent Christmas cakes – the product of further slaving by the Chairman’s wife, Liz.

Music in the form of Christmas songs and carols was provided by Jo Nelhams on digital piano, enhanced by the singing of many of those present, and a good time was had by all.

Our thanks are due to those who kindly provided prizes for the raffle.

GEOFF EGAN 2ND MEMORIAL LECTURE by Don Cooper

Many of us remember Geoff Egan, a hirsute member of the Museum of London, a man with encyclopaedic knowledge of all things medieval and post-medieval, who died in February 2011. A memorial lecture series has been established in his name. This, the second lecture, was held at the Society of Antiquaries on the 14th December 2012 sponsored by the Society for Post-medieval Archaeology. In front of a large audience Bly Straube, the senior archaeological curator at Jamestown, Virginia, USA, the site of the first permanent European settlement in the US in 1607, spoke of the exciting finds from over 25 years of excavation at the site. Over 1.5 million artefacts have been recovered and are conserved and stored on the site.

It would be impossible to detail all the fascinating information which was discovered at this site about the lives of the settlers, their relations with the local native population, the dreadful time they went through when their food ran out, etc and etc., as told by Bly. A couple of things stood out for me:

Apparently each settler was entitled to bring a small bag of personal possessions with him. Some brought coins, for instance, even though there was no money as such in the new settlement, one man brought an antique lamp from the Roman period – I wonder why? Bly made the analogy with modern astronauts going up to the space station, who were also entitled to bring a small bag of mementos and one man took a Florida Fishing License with him – again why?

Trade with the local natives consisted inter alia of glass beads and trinkets and yet on excavations at the natives’ dwelling places almost no such artefacts are recovered – why?

Most of the artefacts, e.g. ceramics, well-preserved metals and so on, came with the settlers from England and as such are a great help in dating the currency of such artefacts. Bly clearly is a great enthusiast about the site and its artefacts and succeeded in communicating her enthusiasm. The web site for Jamestown is https://www.historicjamestowne.org/. It is well worth a visit, especially if you haven’t seen the real thing!

RESISTIVITY AT MARTIN SCHOOL EAST FINCHLEY by Don Cooper

Roger Chapman, a governor at Martin Primary School, East Finchley, is involved in planning the centenary celebrations of the building the school is housed in. As part of that celebration

Roger approached UCL and HADAS to plan a historical and archaeological review of the area. The first manifestation of that task was to carry out some resistivity in the school playing fields during the school’s Christmas fair. Vicki Baldwin, Tim Curtis, Bill Bass, Andy Simpson, Jim Nelhams, Gabe Moshenska (UCL) and I set out a 20 x 20m grid on a very wet playing field on a freezing cold day.

After we completed the grid we processed it on the HADAS computer and were able to show our results to the teachers, parents and pupils who were there. The results were very interesting as can be seen from this photograph of the results as displayed on-screen.

The photograph seems to show a number of field drains running across the playing field towards the school, where we are told there is a large water-collecting culvert. However there are other interesting anomalies also apparent that we look forward to exploring in the spring.

Thanks to all who took part in this first task in what looks to be an exciting and worthwhile project.

BARNET MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

Until January 13th Barnet Museum has an exhibition of loaned objects from The Foundling Museum’s Foundling Hospital and Coram collections. In connection with this there will be an exhibition of images from the Foundling Museum, running until 20th February. The loaned objects will later go on tour until mid-April and can be seen at the public libraries in Hendon, Barnet and Chipping Barnet.

Barnet Museum is now open Tuesday-Thursday, 1.30-4.30pm, Saturday 10am-4pm and Sunday 2-4pm, at 31 Wood St, Barnet EN5 4BE.

OTHER SOCIETIES’ EVENTS compiled by Eric Morgan

Wednesday 16th January 7.30pm. Images from the Archives. Talk, Malcolm Barres-Baker (Brent Archivist). Willesden Local History Society. St Mungo’s Centre, 115 Pound Lane NW10 2HB.

Friday 18th January 7.30pm. London in 1837. Talk, Malcolm Barres-Baker. Wembley Local History Society. St Andrew’s Church Hall, Church Lane, Kingsbury NW9 5AZ. £2.

Monday 21st January 8.15pm. Aircraft Manufacturers in the London Area. Talk, Ron Smith. Ruislip, Northwood & Eastcote Local Hist. Soc. St Martin’s Church Hall, High St/Eastcote Rd, Ruislip HA4 8DG. £2.

Wednesday 23rd January 7.45pm. Life in the Big Company. Talk, Dr Stan Gilks. Friern Barnet & District Local History Society. St John’s Church Hall, Friern Barnet Lane N20 0LP. £2, refreshments.

Wednesday 30th January 1-2pm. Meet the Expert., join the Curator of “Londinium 2012” responsible for reinventing the Museum of London (MoL) Roman Gallery Display & look at the parallels between Londinium & today’s capital city. MoL,150 London Wall, EC2Y 5HN. Free.

Thursday 31st Janaury 2.30pm. Dig for Victory. Talk by Russell Bowes. Finchley Society. Drawing Room Avenue House. £2.

Wednesday 6th February 6pm. Forwards & Backwards: Architecture in inter-war England .Talk by Simon Thurley. MoL (see 30/1/13 above). About the huge expansion of the suburbs. Free.

Thursday 7th February 10.30am-12. History of Pharmacy & Medicine throughout the 20th Century. Talk, Ollie Natelson. Mill Hill Library, Hartley Ave, NW7 2HX. Coffee morning talk, free.

Thursday 7th February 8pm. Harefield & its Charities. Talk, John Ross. Pinner Local History Society. Village Hall, Chapel Lane Car Pak, Pinner. £2.

Friday 8th February 8pm. The Archaeology of the Royal Palaces of Enfield. Talk, Ian Jones. Enfield Society. Jubilee Hall, 2 Parsonage Lane/junction of Chase Side, Enfield EN2 0AJ.

Monday 11th February 3pm. The Peabody Trust.Talk Christine Wagg. Barnet Museum & Local History Society. Church House, Wood St, Barnet (opp. the museum).

Wednesday 13th February 2.30-4pm. The British Library News Collection. Talk, Stewart Gillies. Mill Hill Historical Society. Trinity Church, The Broadway, Mill Hill, NW7.

Friday 15th February 8pm. Greeks, Romans, Byzantines: The Archaeology of Constantinople. Talk, Ian Jones. Enfield Arch.Society Jubilee Hall, 2 Parsonage Lane/jn. Chase Side, Enfield EN2 0AJ.

Wednesday 20th February 7.30pm. Saxby & Farmer: Kilburn’s largest employers. (Internationally famous railway signalling experts, c.1862-1903). Talk, Dick Wendling. Willesden Local History Society. St Mungo’s Centre – see 16th January above.

Thursday 21st February 7.30pm. Unearthing Redpath (one of the most famous fraudsters of the 19th century). Talk, Marian Kamlish & Devid Hayes. Camden History Society. Burgh House, New End Sq, NW3 1LT.

Thursday 21st February 8.15pm. Ancient Egyptian Medicine. Talk, Dr Carole Reeve (UCL). Hampstead Scientific Society. Crypt Room, St John’s Church, Church Row, NW3. Refreshments during interval.

Friday 22tnd February 8pm. The History of Enfield’s Railways. Part 1: The Lea Valley, Southbury & Enfield Town Lines. Talk, Dave Cockle. Joint Edmonton Hundred Historical Society/Enfield Society. Jubilee Hall (see 15th February). £1.

Saturday 23rd February 11am-3.30pm. Enfield Transport Bazaar. North London Transport Society. St Stephen’s Hall, Park Ave, Bush Hill Park EN1 2BA. Admission £2. Refreshments available.

Wednesday 27th February 7.45pm. Individuals in Communities. Talk, Hugh Petrie (see next entry). Friern Barnet & District Local History Society. St John’s Church Hall – see January 23rd. £2.

Thursday 28th February 2.30pm. From the Archives. Talk, Hugh Petrie, London Borough of Barnet Heritage Officer/former Borough Archivist. Finchley Society. Drawing Room, Avenue House. Refreshments before & after. £2.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Grateful thanks to Don Cooper, Eric Morgan, Jim Nelhams and Tim Wilkins