Volume 9: 2010 – 2014

Number 516 March 2014 Edited by Deirdre Barrie
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 5-10 minute walk away.

Tuesday 11th March 2014 – Lecture on the Sandridge Coin Hoard by David Thorold
(Curator, Prehistory to Medieval, Verulamium Museum) The coins are the second largest gold hoard from the fifth century to be found in Britain and represent an extremely high value in terms of cash. Their condition and mint marks (which give the city of manufacture) provide considerable information on the way coins were used in late Roman Britain. The presence of the hoard close to St Albans also suggests that the region was a wealthy one, with local citizens connected to a thriving economy that spread across the Empire.
David Thorold first came to St Albans in 1991, and worked on a number of excavations, including the Folly
Lane chieftain burial, before getting a job at Verulamium Museum as assistant curator. David is now the Curator for Prehistory through to Medieval, and his specialism is in coins, although he has worked on a range of exhibitions including the Egypt series, Stanley Kubrick, maps, masks and Magna Carta. David has written a book on the Romans and Celts for school children, and is currently working on a booklet on the Sandridge Hoard. He worked on the excavation of the coins with the finder and Field Archaeologist Simon West. Stephen Brunning

Tuesday 8th April 2014

Brian James-Strong, River Lea Tidal Mill Trust; Restoring House Mill (working title)

Tuesday 13th May 2014
Malcolm Stokes (HADAS member); The bishop’s hunting park in Highgate

Tuesday 10th June 2014

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

Tuesday 14th October 2014

Dr Nick Ashton – British Museum; Finding Neanderthal tools in Norfolk cliffs

Tuesday 11th November 2014 – TO BE CONFIRMED.

Jo Nelhams adds: Re the Long outing to Kent 29 June to 3 July – we need your support to swell the numbers booked to make sure the trip is viable!

Membership Renewal – by Stephen Brunning, Membership Secretary

The HADAS membership year runs from 1st April, so all memberships are now due for renewal apart from those new members who have joined since January this year. I have enclosed a renewal form for those people who pay by cheque, and would ask that you return the form to me along with your remittance for the appropriate amount. Members who pay by standing order need take no action. The rates remain unchanged.

Anyone who thinks they should have had a membership renewal form or Standing Order form but hasn’t received one, anyone who wants to make their membership under Gift Aid and hasn’t already done so, or anyone who has any question at all about their membership, please contact me. (contact details on back page). Many thanks.

January 2014 Lecture – The Naval Graveyards of Greenwich – Malcolm Godfrey Reported by Liz Gapp

The lecture started with Malcolm introducing himself, explaining how he came to be involved with Greenwich and its graveyards. This was through his commission with the Royal Navy which he joined in 1971, and through his mess management experience he was offered the prestige posting at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. During its transition to new ownership he was asked to write up some history of the college, part of which involved the history of its associated graveyards. Subsequently, he has become the manager of Avenue House where our lecture series are held.

The main part of the lecture was started by showing us a diagram of the Royal Naval College buildings, describing the changes over the years. We were then shown where, the base of the Greenwich Palace that had been razed, had been packed in sand and grassed over once it had been archaeologically excavated. We were told that the chapel where Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn was also on the College campus.

A new palace, known as the King Charles wing, on the right hand side of the entrance, was started by Charles II. Unfinished due to lack of funds, it was finished eventually by William and Mary, James II not having been interested in it.
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The Queen’s House was commissioned by Anne of Denmark, wife of King James I, in 1618. Inigo Jones was requested to do this, his first important commission. Work stopped in 1618, when Anne became ill and subsequently died. James took no interest in the building, and it was mothballed until Charles I gave it to his queen, Henrietta Maria. The building was completed structurally in 1635.

Following the battle of La Hogue in 1692, the complex was started as a retirement home for sailors at the suggestion of Queen Mary II who ordered that the King Charles wing of the palace be remodelled as a naval hospital to provide a counterpoint to the Chelsea Hospital for soldiers. It was designed by Christopher Wren, who initially produced something very like St Paul’s cathedral which blocked the Queen’s House’s view of the Thames. Wren had to redesign it at the Queen’s command to provide full views of the river. It is said that this is why it is fitted in so snugly with no extra room at the sides. Subsequent designing was completed by Hawksmoor and Sir John Vanbrugh.

The nature of the place meant that the inmates were generally old and infirm; hence the need for the graveyards, of which eventually there were three. The first graveyard, at Maze Hill Nos. 32 to 40, was quickly filled with bodies, necessitating the need for a second. So a second, much larger graveyard was established in Goddard’s Garden, a piece of land known as Great Garden Ground. Huge numbers of bodies were buried there, very tightly packed. Burials were on Tuesdays and Thursdays when they would be brought across from the Infirmary. The process was that a trench would be dug containing 18 coffins arranged 2 abreast to a depth of 16 feet, with space for a minimum of 4 inches of earth between each coffin. If there were not sufficient coffins to fill the trench, it would be left open until it was full, sometimes for as long as three weeks.

Eventually 24,000 bodies were buried there, and in 1847 Dr Liddell, Director General of the Medical Department of the Royal Navy, recommended closure of the Goddard’s Garden Graveyard; and a new graveyard was created on land known as East Greenwich Pleasaunce in 1857. Burials in the new graveyard continued until 1981, although the Royal Hospital closed in 1869. The largest number of burials there was of 3,000 bodies, moved from the Goddard’s Garden graveyard when a new dining hall was built for the Royal Hospital School, and a railway tunnel to extend the line from Greenwich to the East coast was cut through the site.

In 1925 1247 skulls and 58 boxes of bones were removed from Goddard’s Garden and reburied in Pleasaunce graveyard. This was to make way for Devonport House to be built to accommodate the nurses for the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital. A later extension to the dining room was built on piles to minimise the disturbance of bodies and need for reburial.

The Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital was a follow-on, named for the last of the three hospital ships moored in the Thames off Greenwich. This last ship was eventually broken up in 1872, when the last of the patients were transferred to the hospital building. This new hospital was for the care of merchant mariners, rather than men from the Royal Navy. This in its turn closed in 1986, and in 1998 to 1999 the building was converted to a library by the University of Greenwich.

The burial plots at the Pleasaunce are in 5 main areas. The mass re-interment of the 3,000 bodies is just inside the Main Gate, and is a grassed area marked with concrete posts. The other areas are the Greenwich Hospital Plot and Royal Hospital School, the Officers’ plot, the Ratings’ and other ranks’ plot, with a random plot for others. The random plot contains people such as Sir John (Dr) Liddell, Captain Henry Parker, Mark Halpen Sweny, James Shepherd, John A Shakes, Admiral Sir Astley Cooper-Key, and interestingly Anthony Sampayo who was French Ambassador to England.

In the Greenwich Hospital Mausoleum are Admiral Thomas Masterman Hardy (of “Kiss me, Hardy” fame); Admiral Lord Hood (governor of the hospital when Nelson’s body returned to England on Christmas Eve, let the bearers in as no-one else was around); and Admiral Lord Rodney.

In the main plot are Thomas Allen (Nelson’s manservant, with a separate obelisk); Captain John Simpson (a late starter at the age of 17, retired at 71, died aged 84); Vice Admiral Sir Thomas Boulder Thompson (Served with Nelson).

The Queen’s House has had several incarnations: the Royal Naval Asylum then the Royal Hospital School which was moved to Holbrook in 1933, on land given by shipping magnate Gifford Sherman Reade in 1921.

The Greenwich Hospital closed in 1869, the building then becoming the Royal Naval College which in turn then closed in 1997, subsequently being known as the Old Royal Naval College, a foundation set up in 1998 to look after the buildings.

Finally, mention was made of some of the penal executions that took place in the area, where bodies were hung, drowned in 3 tides, and left hanging as a warning, after having been covered in tar. Fortunately, noone lived in the near vicinity as the smell would have been unpleasant.

This was an excellent lecture given by an enthusiastic lecturer.

Adios Buxton Jim Nelhams

The weather forecast for our journey home was not encouraging, but go home we must. We decided to leave slightly earlier and stop at Cromford Mill, on our original plan but deferred, because of earlier diversions, and on our route to Crich.
Cromford Mill Jean Bayne

Thomas Carlyle described Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) as ‘a plain almost gross, bag-cheeked, pot-bellied Lancashire man – of copious free digestion. He was also a genius: a persistent and determined visionary, an imaginative inventor, a meticulous planner, and an astute manager. His invention for spinning cotton yarn, powered by water – the Water Frame – brought about the modern factory system and helped to develop the Industrial Revolution.

Interested in mechanical devices, he purloined the results of others’ inventions to develop his own, and persuaded wealthy investors to back him. His first attempt at a cotton-spinning mill in Nottingham used horses to turn a capstan, but they needed feeding, stabling and supervision and failed to work 24 hours a day. In short, economically inefficient; he thought water power would be more effective. Originally a wigmaker, he had travelled extensively around the North West buying hair and remembered the water courses at Cromford. So he rented a site at Cromford Brook to harness the Cromford Sough, a lead mine drainage channel, and later the Bonsall Brook as constant sources of water power for his cotton-spinning invention. In 1771, the first mill of five storeys was built and then extended in 1785. It was constructed to house his water frame machines and perfect the essential mechanisation of the pre-spinning process. None of his machines had been made before, so he had to advertise for joiners, clockmakers and wheelwrights etc. with particular skills.

The first mill is on your left, at right angles as you come into the complex of buildings that now make up the site. It is now only three storeys high instead of five, as it was reduced by fire in 1929. The building was eleven bays long and 30 feet wide. A wooden aqueduct, later replaced by a cast-iron one, brought water from the Cromford Sough across the road. It fed the enlarged overshot water wheel built close to the mill, which was augmented by a second wheel powered by the Bonsall Brook when an extension was added in 1785. There is a hole in the mill wall where the first wheel went, and the remains of the wheel-pit of the second one can still be seen. The Arkwright Society has been exploring and excavating the site and restoring buildings since 1979. It has uncovered the foundations of the transmission system, which converted the power of the water wheel to drive the machinery for cleaning and carding on the upper floors, as well as the spinning on the first and second floors.

A second mill was constructed in 1776-7 and was an ambitious project. Arkwright had, by now, perfected his machinery and built a 7-storey mill with a mill-wheel housed within the building. It was a very large wheel which necessitated a deep pit – which can be seen today – and a good head of water. He linked the Cromford Sough with the Bonsall Brook to get the strong flow. But, as the water which left the pit was at a lower level than the River Derwent into which it drained, Arkwright had to construct a long culvert and open channel to get the water away. The wheel is estimated to have worked at 20-25 HP. There was a drive-shaft taking power to the water frames on the floor above. The mill was stone built with 16-17 bays, and had space for offices and storage as well as machinery. It even had lavatories on each floor! The second mill no longer exists, although there are remnants of an added annexe surviving.

By 1790s, the mill complex reached the peak of its production .The water supply began to be lost about the 1840s, and the mills finally closed down in the 1880s. At the height of its working life, Arkwright employed 800 operatives. Many were women and children from the surrounding villages, but he also built hostel accommodation on site for unmarried male employees who came from further afield. Only the foundations remain of ‘The Barracks‘ (1786) as it was called. He also built the first industrial housing at Cromford: 27 three-storey houses of a good standard with gardens.

Other buildings were constructed in the 1780s, housing machinery, warehouses, stabling, packing sheds and offices including the Counting House. From outside the complex, one of the main buildings has few windows at lower levels. This may have been because another building abutted it. Or, it has been suggested that it may have been constructed in this way to deter Luddites. General security was also provided by the Mill Gateway, with separate access for both pedestrians and horses. One of the buildings would have contained a warehouse for loading cotton on to barges on the Cromford canal wharf situated outside but close by the complex. This gave a link to another canal which was intended to provide a through route to Manchester. But this only came about later in the nineteenth century when the Railway was constructed. However, the canal network proved useful for increased trade.

Arkwright dominated the area. He built his own chapel, St Mary’s, which later became a church. At the beginning he had a house close to the mill, but later built Willersley Castle, an imposing dynastic seat with rolling lawns. It was behind the mill on rising ground and without a direct view of it. Richard Arkwright never lived there as it caught fire in 1791. His son, however, completed it and lived there for the rest of his life. By 1843, the younger Richard Arkwright was a landed gentleman investor, reputed to be the richest commoner in Europe. From artisan to aristocrat in two generations!

There is no doubt that Arkwright Senior, whose driving force was to make money, was the founding father of the factory system, rationalising the spirit of production in keeping with the zeitgeist of the age. And he provided a model for the rest of the industrialising world. From a modern perspective, the employment, in the early days, of seven-year-old children and the 24-hour working schedule with 13 hour shifts is horrific, but was gradually modified throughout the nineteenth century. Later, under Arkwright’s son, contemporary reports suggest that the general health and mortality rates of both children and adults in the mills was better than that of the very poor and unemployed. He raised the age for work to ten, and insisted that children should know how to read, and provided some education. A Sunday school had been set up in 1785 and Arkwright Senior had encouraged clubs and friendly societies. So there was some effort to ameliorate the condition of the poor, even if it was in his own self-interest to do so. Work in the mill was still very hard, but preferable to the lead mines or the fields.

Cromford Mill is in a ruinous state at present .But, it is possible even now to half shut your eyes and see the workers coming and going in this relatively small and compact site: the mill wheel turning, the water frothing and churning, the clatter of machinery and horses and carts and, perhaps, the sharp ping of clogs on the limestone ground. Arkwright had many other mills which were mostly sold off by his son. He did retain Cromford, however. And the site was used by other industries for some time. Restoration work by the Arkwright Society, which bought the site, will help to bring it back to life in a twenty-first century context.

Cromford was the first cotton-spinning mill powered by water, and the first example of cotton production on an industrial scale. In recognition of this, UNESCO declared Cromford and other mills in the Derwent Valley a World Heritage Site in 2001. Industrialisation changed forever the way people lived and worked.
As one historian has observed ‘the factory system substituted capital for labour, machines for skill, factory for home and mill discipline for family work routines’.(Cromford Mill Guide)
Rain-spattered Cobbles Andy Simpson

And so to what, for obvious reasons, was a highlight of the visit for me – the Crich Tramway Village – the
National Tramway Museum, established by the Tramway Museum Society in a Peak district quarry above Matlock in 1959, and expanded gradually ever since, with electric trams and their supporting equipment collected from around the world running there since June 1964. See http://www.tramway.co.uk/

When we arrived there to collect our genuine old penny to exchange for our mile-long tram ride up the slope from ‘Town End’ to Glory Mine, it was pouring down with rain, the rain barely stopping all the time we were there. Fortunately, with shop, pub, running sheds and display hall we could stay under cover when not on the tram. Two trams with their volunteer crews were initially running for our enjoyment – Leeds 345 ‘Convert’ car built 1921 and rebuilt and upgraded in 1939, and Blackpool ‘standard’ balcony car 40 built 1926, withdrawn in 1963 as the last open balcony car to operate in normal service in the UK. The specially adapted former Berlin wheel-chair fitted ‘access tram’, No. 3006, built in 1969 also came out later.

Amongst strong contingents from the last traditional UK street tramways – Leeds (closed 1959), Sheffield (1960), Glasgow (1962) and Blackpool (still running) – there is also a healthy London contingent in the collection. As part of my long-standing involvement with the London County Council Tramways Trust, I worked on the restoration of ‘LCC E/1r’ double decker 1622 (rescued derelict from a Hampshire wood) at our former Bethnal Green and Ilford workshops in the early 1990s; the Trust, through financial donations and sales of transport memorabilia and books, have also paid for the restoration (twice!) of LCC B-class open top car (and one-time ‘snowbroom’ works car) 106 of 1903 and most recently, the elegant Edwardian London United Tramways open top bogie car 159 of 1902 which ran only until 1921 and survived built into a house; next up is LCC no 1 of 1932 – as ‘Bluebird’ the last complete new tram built for the original first-generation London Tramways before the Croydon light rail system came along, which later ran in Leeds until 1957. Also present is prototype Feltham car 331 of 1930 that once ran on the Metropolitan Electric Tramways from Cricklewood to North Finchley and Whetstone until 1936 when replaced by trolleybuses (and was later sold to Sunderland), and one side of the former 1890s-built London Street Tramways No 39 horse car in the display hall. Barely a dozen London trams escaped the scrapman, most being burnt by George Cohens’ ‘600 Group’ at the Penhall Road, Charlton ‘tramatorium’ 1950-53.

And hence to Foxton – and sunshine! (TO BE CONTINUED)

(Minor) Apologies for February 2014 Newsletter Layout
Last month’s newsletter production was fraught – the reversed last pages were the ultimate result of the large number of interesting pictures in the issue. Some computer systems just refused to handle the large files involved, so time ran out along with the chance to check everything. Apologies from whichever of us actually caused the problem.

Some people getting the newsletter also found a few pages very faint. We have enough spare, good, copies to replace these. Please contact Jo Nelhams (details back page) if you need one. Thanks, Mary Rawitzer
The Museum of London is coming to Brent Cross Shopping Centre

This March drop by Brent Cross to discover Barnet’s history, and handle archaeology found in and around the borough! Join Museum of London experts and local volunteers (possibly HADAS members!) to find out how we care for objects from the past – plus handle real artefacts from Barnet and its surrounding areas. Hands-on Archaeology, Brent Cross Shopping Centre Thursday 13 March-Friday 14 March, 9am – 8pm. For more information email communityarchaeology@museumoflondon.org.uk.

“Unearthing Barnet” is part of a series of events taking place through the year, bringing Museum of London artefacts and expertise to London’s outer boroughs. Keep an eye on our website for information on our next project location: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/unearthing.

OTHER SOCIETIES’ EVENTS Eric Morgan

Until 15 March: Crossrail’s “Portals to the Past” Exhibition, Crossrail’s Visitor Information Centre,
Tottenham Court Road, 16-18 St Giles High St. WC2H 8LN (near Centre Point). Sat. 10-5, Tue-Thu 11-7, Wed. 11-5.30 pm. An exhibition of recent finds from the Crossrail Archaeology Programme. Weekly lecture: Wed. 6pm. More than 50 objects displayed for the first time. (See website: www.crossrail.co.uk )

Thursday 20th March, 2-3 pm. Guildhall Library, Aldermanbury EC2V 7HH. “London’s Myths and Legends”, talk by Robert Stephenson (CoLAS) “From the Roman Temple to Diana by St Paul’s Onwards“. Free, but please book with Eventbrite. Visit www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/guildhalllibrary. Email:
GHLevents@cityoflondon.gov.uk. Tel: 020 7332 1869/3803. For further details, see February Newsletter.

Thursday 27th March, 8pm. Finchley Society, Drawing Room, Avenue House, East End Rd., N3 3QE. “Do Front Gardens Matter?” Discussion with a panel. Intro. by Mike Gee. Visitors £2. Listed in Feb Newsletter.

OTHER SOCIETIES’ EVENTS (continued)

Wednesday 2nd April, 5pm. British Archaeological Association, Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1V OHS. “The Staffordshire Hoard Project: The Current State of Knowledge.” Talk by Chris Fern. Tea 4.30 pm.

Wednesday 2nd April, 8 pm, Stanmore & Harrow Historical Society, Wealdstone Baptist Church Hall, High St., Wealdstone. “The Secret East End.” Talk by Diane Burstein (London Guide). Visitors £1.

Thursday 3rd April, 8pm, Pinner Local History Society, Village Hall, Chapel Lane car park, Pinner. “Celebrating Shakespeare: how anniversaries of his birth and death have been marked.” Talk by Richard Foulkes. Visitors £2.

Friday 11th April, 2-3 pm, Guildhall Library, Aldermanbury, EC2V 7HH. “London’s Traditional Customs and Ceremonies”. Talk by Robert Stephenson. Free, but please book with Eventbrite (as 20 March above).

Monday, 14th April, 3pm. Barnet Museum & Local History Society, Church House, Wood Street, Barnet (opposite Barnet Museum). “The National Census and a House In Clerkenwell.” Talk, Marlene McAndrew.

Monday 14th April, 7.45 pm, West Essex Archaeological Society, Woodford County High School, High Road, Woodford Green, E18. “Local Military Archaeology” – talk by Guy Taylor (COLAS and HADAS).

Wednesday, 23rd April, 7.45 pm, Friern Barnet & District Local History Society, North Middlesex Golf
Club, The Manor House, Friern Barnet Lane, N20 ONL. “A View of the New River” – talk by Rachael Macdonald. Visitors £2, refreshments.

Thursday 24th April, 8 pm. Finchley Society, Christchurch, High Road, North Finchley, N12 (opposite Homebase). Talk details not yet finalised. (Please see Mar/Apr Finchley Society Newsletter. Please note different venue. Visitors £2. Refreshments.

o. 514 January 2014 Edited by Sue Willetts

HADAS DIARY 2014

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 14th January 2014, 8pm. The Naval Graveyards of Greenwich. Lecture by Malcolm Godfrey.

Tuesday 11th February 2014. To be confirmed.

Tuesday 11th March 2014, 8pm. The Sandridge Coin Hoard. Lecture by David Thorold, Curator (Prehistory to Medieval), Verulamium Museum.

Tuesday 8th April 2014, 8pm. Restoring House Mill (working title) Brian James-Strong, River Lea Tidal Mill Trust.

Further Dates for your diaries

The Mary Rose Museum. Thursday, 15th May 2014. If you would like to come please let us know in good time. We will travel by coach and spend the day at Portsmouth dock visiting the Mary Rose Museum, Nelson’s HMS. Victory and HMS Warrior. With an overall ticket for all the attractions and including the coach the cost is expected to be about £45 per person.

HADAS Long Outing to Kent 2014

This will be from Sunday June 29th to Thursday July 3rd, 2014, staying at a Best Western Hotel in Canterbury – Abbots Barton Hotel. Please see separate booking form.

Correction from December 2013 Newsletter: Don Cooper

It has been pointed out that in last month’s newsletter, in Judy Kazarnovsky’s obituary it said that HADAS had made a donation to the North London Hospice, it should have said that the donation was made by individuals as HADAS, a registered charity, cannot make donations to other charities. It was loose wording on my part – mea culpa. No HADAS funds were used.

HADAS Christmas Party

The third HADAS Christmas party was again held at Avenue House. These have proved to be some of the best attended events with around 50 members being present. It is good to see members who are unable to attend the lectures or outings coming along.

It was a similar format with a buffet lunch provided by Avenue House, then various activities consisting of a table quiz, raffle and musical entertainment. This year, besides communal singing, Jim and Jo performed a couple of Victorian numbers, with modified lyrics to encompass some of the HADAS characters.

It was an entertaining afternoon and all appeared to have had an enjoyable time. We look forward to seeing everybody in 2014 supporting more HADAS activities.

The following seasonal poem was mentioned by Liz Tucker to members of the Committee at the Christmas party. I hope you agree that it has a place in this first Newsletter of the year. Ed.

Deck the Halls Liz Tucker

Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Fala….
‘Tis the season to be jolly,
Trim the tree, put out the snacks,
Send the festive Yuletide fax.

Raise the roof, both male and female,
Send the jocund Yuletide e-mail,
With a message blithe and merry!
Mark it “Sent from my Black-Berry”.

Roast the goose, roll out the barrel,
From your iPod play a carol,
Singing of a mystic birth,
(Find the inn on Google Earth.)

Quaff the foaming mug of bitter,
Tweet your greetings round on Twitter,
Thinking, as the old year ends,
Of your numerous Facebook friends.

As the hours of darkness dwindle,
Read some Dickens on your Kindle,
Slice the pudding up, and next
Snd the mry Xms txt.

Celebrate, ye lads and lasses,
To the webcam raise your glasses.
Spread the word from pole to pole-
You needn’t meet a living soul!

Lions on Kunulua Talk by Fiona Haughey on November 12th Sue Willetts

This interesting and well illustrated talk was an excellent overview of the excavations and finds including fine sculptures from the Early Bronze and Iron Age periods at the ancient site of Tell Tayinat, in Hatay in south-eastern Turkey. This well positioned extensive site is situated to the north-east of Antioch on the bend of the Orontes River – originally a very fertile area which has become heavily silted up. The original excavations from the 1930’s were not fully published and re-excavation began in 1990. Fiona has been involved since 2003 mainly in drawing and recording work. More recently the proximity of the war zone to the east has made working conditions very difficult. Six areas are currently being worked on – the site is mainly composed of mud brick although some stone has been used but not for buildings. The team is concentrating on the citadel area and has identified a textile creation room, three palaces and a temple with stone steps leading to an important sacred precinct. A very important find of a large double sided cuneiform tablet contains details of a treaty which includes (and proves) the name of the city Kunulua.

As indicated by her title, Fiona decided to highlight some of the magnificent stone carvings from the site and showed us both photographs and her detailed drawings of the stone lions – they are definitely lions and not another cat species – from the distinctive tufts on the end of their tails. The craftsmen used basalt which would have been available locally. One was found lying on its side and when righted was found to be in perfect condition including finely carved genitalia. It would have had inlaid eyes and it is thought that the hollow area on the head was used to contain incense. Other ‘animal’ sculptures include a winged bull and a sphinx but the more recent and spectacular find is part of a colossal male figure with prominent eyes, a large nose, beard, curly hair, a necklace and a sword. The inscription of the back of his clothing identifies him as King Suppiluliuma.

Buxton Trip

Buxton itself Jim Nelhams

Our trips give us the chance to get to know other members and discover their different interests. So we had an afternoon to explore the town of Buxton. It’s so nice when exploring an unknown place to keep bumping into people you know, and stopping to exchange comments and ideas.

An Afternoon of Curiosity. Patrick McSharry

On our second full day our group had the opportunity of roaming Buxton at will delving into the cultural heritage and life of a market town which can reliably trace its origins back to the Roman period. Buxton enjoys the unique distinction of having the highest elevation (over 1000ft above sea level) of any market town in England. What is more, it is regarded as “the gateway” to the Peak District National Park.

The town of Buxton consists of an upper and lower town; the former being the old, and the latter the new part of the town and depending on one’s physical dexterity and level of curiosity determined how much time we were prepared to spend in making the most of our free afternoon in Buxton. Having visited Buxton twice in the past I chose simply to sample the culinary delights as well as visiting the book shops rather than overload my senses visiting, for example, the Buxton Museum or other cultural icons worthy of one’s attention and honed sense of awe.

Of greater significance perhaps for a town, as opposed to the big northern cities, Buxton has a vibrant cultural life on a par with the great urban centres such as Manchester and Leeds. Indeed it hosts several music and theatre festivals each year. This reputation has been further enhanced by the recent refurbishment of the Pavilion Arts Centre. The Opera House built in 1903 and designed by Frank Matcham who was also responsible for the design of two London theatres: the London Coliseum (1904) and the London Palladium (1910), has a year-long programme of drama, concerts, comedy and other cultural events. The International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival – a three-week long theatre festival – was hosted by Buxton from 1994 until this year. It is due to move to Harrogate for the 2014 due to Buxton’s failure, so it is reported, to commit to the festival’s future. This is a sad day for Buxton.

Buxton historical fame is that of a spa town because of the thermal springs which date back to the Roman occupation. That said, the thermal baths are, sadly, no longer open to the public (they finally closed in 1972) so ‘taking the waters’ is a thing of the past but this has not prevented Buxton continuing to refer to itself as a Spa town. After the First World War, the spa industry went into gradual decline and by the 1950s Buxton had become a ‘backwater’. However by the 1980s, like the phoenix rising from the ashes, Buxton had managed to reinvent itself into a developing cultural haven and more recently the University of Derby has opened a campus occupying the Devonshire Royal Hospital building which potentially may well rival (in the future) the great traditional seats of learning that we are so familiar with!

Architecturally Buxton has much to showcase. The Crescent was modelled on Bath’s Royal Crescent. Designed by John Carr it features a grand assembly room and boasts a fine painted ceiling. Currently it remains unoccupied although there are plans afoot for it to be converted into a hotel. A sign of the times perhaps! The Devonshire Dome which subsequently became the Devonshire Royal Hospital (and now the Devonshire Campus of the University of Derby) built, like the Crescent, in the latter part of the eighteenth century dominates Buxton’s skyline and helps to define its architectural history. It would be remiss of me if I did not mention as worthy of inspection Buxton railway station, the Pavilion Gardens, the Pump Room and the Palace Hotel which traditionally have defined the architectural tableau of Buxton. In terms of famous Buxtonians I ought to mention Vera Brittain (mother of Shirley Williams) of Testament of Youth fame. Elizabeth Spriggs the actress, Tim Brooke-Taylor (one of the Goodies) and Bruno Langley of Coronation Street fame to mention the few familiar names apropos the 20th century.

In being let loose in Buxton we all had our own agendas as to what we might do in terms of engaging our well honed senses in that cultural oasis that was Buxton itself set in a rural hinterland – heaven on earth. At the end of the day we were all very selective in our choices and once exhausted we beat a respectable retreat back to the hotel to enjoy the evening and the excellent fare which we had now come to expect of a reputable family hotel.

The Pavilion Gardens Railway Buxton David Robinson

Despite the inclement weather on the final morning in Buxton Emma and I decided to take another look at the substantial Victorian Pleasure Gardens at the centre of the town. In particular I wanted to make a further examination of the miniature railway and its locomotive and having got thoroughly wet I was not disappointed to locate what appeared to be a small steam locomotive in the railway’s tunnel which serves to protect locomotive and rolling stock when these are not in use. I was sufficiently interested to take a few measurements and it is apparent that the gauge is currently 12.25 inches (that tape measure often comes in handy), whilst the length of the track appeared to be in the region of 300 yards. Because of the weather we then made a quick retreat to the café in the Pavilion and left the gardens to the hundreds of ducks that had congregated there to celebrate their own version of a pleasant day. After this I did a little more research and, very much to my surprise, found that matters were not wholly as they seemed.

The gardens themselves can be dated to 1871 and were one of the parks laid out by Edward Milner. Looking at the formal arrangement of the flower beds, the carefully channelled river and the boating lake, together with the associated winter gardens and other buildings, it is easy to accept that the whole does indeed belong to the Victorian era. However, it appears that the railway was not constructed until 1972, when originally opened with a 10.25 inch gauge, and that it was not converted to the present gauge until 1998. In addition to this, although the locomotive has indeed been built to look as if it is steam operated, it is in fact a diesel hydraulic, undoubtedly easier to maintain and a more economic proposition (a sorry state of affairs for steam lovers). The current locomotive that was introduced with the change of gauge referred to is named after the designer of the gardens and operates at week-ends throughout the year. Previously the locomotive used was named Borough of Buxton and was of a similar design to the current motive power. Both of the locomotives were supplied by Shepperton Metal Products and Edward Milner appeared to be well maintained and was certainly a good deal drier than I was at the time of observation. The moral of this tale? Things are not always as they first appear.

Laundry – What Laundry? By Don Cooper

As briefly referred to in last month’s newsletter (no. 513 December 2013) HADAS have been excavating at Avenue House. The main objective of the dig was to examine the depression in the ground in front of the water tower. Bill Bass is currently writing this up for a future newsletter. However, there is a mention of a laundry being west of the water tower as well as some glasshouses in the Avenue House’s draft Conservation Management Plan 2013, so it was decided with Avenue House management’s agreement that we could put in a small trench (2m x 1m) called Trench 2 to see if we could get any evidence of these structures. The sketch (Fig. 1, see page 6) with East End Road at the bottom shows where the trench was in relation to the water tower.

Figure 1 Location of Trench 2

The trench was located over a protruding piece of west facing apparent wall. Although this was a very small trench it yielded quite a lot of intriguing information. After we had removed the leaves and litter detritus mainly sweet paper, we confirmed that the protruding structure was indeed the remains of a wall made of similar reinforced concrete to the water tower. As can be seen from the sketch in Figure 2 and the photograph labelled Figure 3.

Figure 2 – Sketch of Trench 2

Figure 2 Trench 2 with slate floor facing west

Other Societies’ Events

Wednesday 22nd Jan. 7.45 pm. Friern Barnet & District Local History Soc. North Middx. Golf Club, The Manor House, Friern Barnet Lane, N20 0NL. NB: New venue. Postcards of the Easter Rising. Talk by Edward Margiotta. Non members £2.00. Refreshments before and after the talk.

Tuesday 28th Jan. 6.00 pm. Gresham College, at Museum of London. 150 London Wall, EC2Y 5HN. Modern reading in an historical context – exploring varying ways in which people have read across time. Talk by Belinda Jack. Free. NB. There is a follow up to this talk on February 25th .

Thursday 30th Jan. 2.30 pm. Finchley Society. Drawing Room, Avenue House, East End Road, N3 3QE. The history of the Highgate Gatehouse. Talk by John Plews. Non members £2.00. Refreshments before and after the talk.

Thursday 6th Feb. 10.30 am. Pinner Local History Society. Village Hall, Chapel Lane Car Park, Pinner. The Underground at War. Talk by David Burnell. Visitors £2.00

Monday 10th Feb. 3.00 pm. Barnet Museum & Local History Society. Church House, Wood St, Barnet. (opposite The Museum) Barnet Whispers through Time. Talk by Barry Ainsworth.

Wednesday 12th Feb. 2.30 pm. Mill Hill Historical Society. Trinity Church, The Broadway, NW7. A century of Medical Research in Mill Hill. Talk by Jim Smith (Director of Medical Research Centre)

Wednesday 12th Feb. 7.45 pm. Hornsey Historical Society. Union Church Hall, Corner Ferme Park Rd, Weston Park, N8 9PX. A view of the New River. Talk by Rachael Macdonald (H.H.S) Visitors £2.00 Refreshments, sales and information 7.40 pm

Saturday 15th Feb. 11.00 am – 3.00 pm. North London & Essex Transport Society. Barnet Transport Fair. Christ Church Hall, St.Albans Rd, Barnet, EN5 4LA. Bus, railway, aviation and military transport with books, photos, DVD’s, maps, timetables, memorabilia etc. Admission £2.00 Refreshments available throughout

Wednesday 19th Feb. 7.30 pm. Willesden Local History Society. St. Mary’s Church Hall, Neasden Lane, NW10 2TS. (near Magistrates Court) Making Music in Kilburn and Willesden. (from 1920’s to the present day). Talk by Dick Weindling (Camden History Society)

Thursday 20th Feb. 7.30 pm. Camden History Society. Venue details not yet available. Primrose Hill: The History of a London Hill. Talk by Martin Sheppard. For more details: contact Mrs J. Ramsay. 020 7586 4436 or www.camdenhistorysociety.org Visitors £1.00

Tuesday 25th Feb. 6.00 pm. Gresham College, at Museum of London. 150 London Wall, EC2Y 5HN. Modern reading in an historical context. Talk by Belinda Jack. Free. Follow up from 28th Jan.

Wednesday 26th Feb. 7.45 pm. Friern Barnet & District Local History Soc. North Middx. Golf Club, The Manor House, Friern Barnet Lane, N20 0NL. The Bayeux Tapestry. Talk by John Neal. Non members £2.00. Refreshments before and after the talk.

Corrections to the December Newsletter.

Monday 13th January. ‘Boy snatching in London’ should of course be ‘Body’; Tuesday 20th January should be Tuesday 28th January

Until 5th Jan. ‘Landscape of Plenty’ is at Forty Hall (Long Gallery), Forth Hill, Enfield, EN2 9HA

Acknowledgements: Don Cooper, Eric Morgan, Jim Nelhams, Patrick McSharry, Liz Tucker, Sue Willetts

No. 513 December 2013 Edited by Don Cooper

It is Christmas time again! I’ve just looked out my window and somebody has just turned on their Christmas lights, it’s the 11th of November – Grrr. I’m clearly a killjoy. However as this newsletter won’t reach you until the 1st December, May I on behalf of the HADAS community wish you and yours a very happy holiday and a healthy, prosperous and happy 2014. Happy Christmas, Editor

HADAS DIARY 2013 & 2014

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 14th January 2014, 8pm. The Naval Graveyards of Greenwich. Lecture by Malcolm Godfrey. This may change as poor Malcolm has been ill – we wish him a speedy recovery.

Tuesday 11th February 2014. To be announced.

Tuesday 11th March 2014, 8pm. The Sandridge Coin Hoard. Lecture by David Thorold, Curator (Prehistory to Medieval), Verulamium Museum.

Tuesday 8th April 2014, 8pm. Restoring House Mill (working title) Brian James-Strong, River Lea Tidal Mill Trust.

Date for your diaries – The Mary Rose Museum

Many of us have been looking forward to visiting the newly reopened Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth docks, we have now arranged a date for this trip. It is Thursday, 15th May 2014. If you would like to come please let us know in good time. We will travel by coach and spend the day at Portsmouth dock visiting the Mary Rose Museum, Nelson’s HMS. Victory and HMS. Warrior. With an overall ticket for all the attractions and including the coach the cost is expected to be about £45 per person.

HADAS LONG OUTING 2014 – another date for your diary

During our trip to Buxton, we indicated that we hoped to go to Kent in 2014. We have now found a suitable hotel. No dates in September were available, so we have booked from Sunday 29th June returning home on Thursday 3rd July, You never know we might get good weather! The Hotel, approved by Ted, a regular member of our group, is the Best Western Abbots Barton Hotel in Canterbury (www.bestwestern.co.uk/Abbots_Barton). More details next month, but it is likely that the costs will not exceed 2013.
A New Book by a HADAS member

Jennie Lee Cobban has re-written her book, Geoffrey de Mandeville and London’s Camelot, Ghosts, Mysteries and the Occult in Barnet, which she first published in 1997. Additional information and illustrations have been added and the revised volume is now published and is available locally from Barnet Museum.
See also:carnegiepublishing.co.uk/2012/01/jennie-lee-cobban/‎

https://twitter.com/JennieLeeCobban/status/396042821880532992‎

Judy Kazarnovsky – an obituary

We’re very sad to report that Judy Kazarnovsky died in October after a brave and lengthy battle with cancer. She was surrounded and supported by her family. Judy, who often thoughtfully used the name Judy Kaye just to make our life easier, was for a time a most helpful HADAS Membership Secretary. She had many other interests, including support of a charity active in health education in West Africa.. HADAS has made a donation in her memory to the North London Hospice in Finchley, where her family say she was looked after with wonderful devotion and care during her last few days.

Newsletter Editor: You can do it

Our Newsletter rota of 12 editors – one each month – is actually one short. Can you volunteer to take this on? It’s just once a year and very good experience – please contact Sue Willetts (sue.willetts@london.ac.uk) or Mary Rawitzer (mary.rawitzer@talktalk.net; Tel: 020 8340 7434) for more information. Basically, it mainly involves putting together e-mailed and hand-written items in a simple framework, with help and advice available. Your Newsletter Needs You!

HADAS NEWS

There is a planning application being prepared to develop land west of Edgwarebury Farm House as an 18-hole golf course see http://acolaidpublic.barnet.gov.uk/online-applications/ and search for H/04377/13. The site is very near the Roman site at Brockley Hill.
HADAS has submitted the following comment:
“I would like to make the following comment on behalf of the Hendon and District Archaeological Society (HADAS) of which I am chairman. The proposed site is close to the important Roman site at Brockley Hill. The Brockley Hill site has been much excavated and published as a pottery manufacturing site, however, many areas of the site have not been discovered particularly where the workers at the site lived with all the attendant facilities of their lives. It is at least probable that some heritage remains will be lost if this site is not properly investigated. Therefore we believe that a strong archaeological condition should be applied to this project. Should this condition be applied we would have no further objections on heritage grounds.”
Continuing the golf course theme, there are proposals by Old Ford Golf Course to re-landscape part of the course using landfill. Using landfill in this sensitive area, the possible site of the Battle of Barnet in 1471, would potentially damage important archaeology. The land is owned by Barnet Council and it is hoped that should such a proposal proceed to planning, at the very least, a strong archaeological condition would be applied.
HADAS have been excavating at Avenue House, East End Road, Finchley. We were commissioned by Avenue House management to excavate and explore a suspicious depression to the north of the 1880s water tower. The hope was that we might find an entrance to the tower or, perhaps, the area where the pump, which was used to lift water up to the top of the tower, had been. No such luck all we found were pipes.

We also dug a small trench where a probably laundry/wash house was sited. There will be a full report in a future newsletter.
Excavation is starting at Barnet Courthouse and HADAS hope to be able to site-watch although it is expected that much of the archaeology will have been destroyed by the building.
Barnet and District Historical Society and Barnet Museum have asked HADAS to assist them in recording the fill-in male and female public toilets beside the museum as it is possible they were on the site of the Old Barnet Brewery cellars.
Note: Barnet Museum have produced a lovely calendar for 2014 full of old photos of Barnet – A Christmas present perhaps?
Roman’s in Kingsbury – with thanks to the Brent and Kilburn Times of 14th November and Nathalie Raffray.
Excavations by Archaeology South East (ASE) on the corner of Blackbird Hill and Old Church Lane on the site of the Blackbird pub (recently the Blarney Stone) turned up a pit and an amount of Roman pottery fragments. These, with the Roman hypocaust tiles in the fabric of the Old St Andrew’s Church in Kingsbury, would seem to indicate the presence of a Roman building somewhere in the immediate surrounding area.
Martin School air-raid shelter – an update. By Bill Bass

Roger Chapman continues his search through documentary records, the latest resource we have been looking at is aerial-photography, and an RAF photo from 1946 has turned-up. This appears to show possible signage and a surface entrance from the Great North Road leading to the centre of the buried shelter complex where a covered building may have steps leading down into the shelter. The southern half of the complex appears to be larger than the northern half. Some other smaller structures seen maybe vents or emergency exits. Transposing our survey – the plan and map work over the photo, the features align quite well together. The photo does seem to infer that the shelter was intact and a going concern throughout the war period, being demolished sometime after.

Some further questions we could ask – when was it demolished and backfilled, was one half used for the general public and the other for the school. Was there a dedicated entrance for the school? How do the above ground shelters relate to the buried ones? There some other earthworks which are directly adjacent to the shelter, what are these?

We will probably return to the school for further fieldwork and survey, and to excavate the main entrance and answer some of the queries.

More work needs to be done on the photo as it has only recently come to hand.

Latest news from historic Deptford by Stewart Wild

I reported in the HADAS newsletter in September this year – “Support for the ambitious Build the Lenox project, Deptford” – that part of the regeneration proposals at Convoys Wharf, Deptford, included restoration of nearby Sayes Court Gardens.

The Gardens were created around 1670 by diarist and horticulturist John Evelyn (1620–1706) and in the 1880s they played a key role in the foundation of the National Trust a decade later. The name probably comes from Geoffrey de Saye (1135–1214), Lord of West Greenwich, or from his son, also Geoffrey de Saye (1155–1230).

Deptford owes its name to the deep ford which crossed the River Ravensbourne near its influx into the Thames before it widened into Deptford Creek. The dockyard dates from 1513 when young Henry VIII established the King’s Yard here to build and provide maintenance for his growing navy; the Mary Rose was launched from here in 1517.

The Deptford Dockyard area has since 2000 been the heart of an extensive regeneration project by developer Hutchison Whampoa, owned by a Chinese billionaire, whose plans have met with considerable local opposition. However, in October this year, encouraged by the National Trust and the Council for British Archaeology, the World Monuments Fund placed the whole site including the Gardens on its watch list of areas with notable heritage.

A little history

In 1651 John Evelyn was given by King Charles II a long lease on a large plot of land by the dockyard with permission to create a house with French and Italian gardens, hundreds of trees, a parterre and terrace walk, ornamental lake, orchard, herb garden, orangery and even beehives. Sadly, none of this survives today and we only know of its splendour from letters written by Evelyn at the time.

Another famous historical character associated with the area is the Dutch-born sculptor and wood carver Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721), who rented a cottage here from Evelyn in 1671. Evelyn wrote in his diary: “I saw the young man at his carving, by the light of a candle. I saw him to be engaged on a carved representation of Tintoretto’s Crucifixion, which he had in a frame of his own making.”

Later that same evening, Evelyn described what he had seen to Sir Christopher Wren. Wren and Evelyn then introduced Gibbons to Charles II who gave him his first commission, which still resides today in the dining room at Windsor Castle.

In 1694 Evelyn vacated his London estate and moved back to his birthplace Wotton House, near Dorking in Surrey. He rented the riverside property to the notorious Captain (later Admiral) John Benbow (1653–1702) who, Evelyn complained, failed to maintain the estate properly – perhaps because he was so often away at sea battling the French.

A later tenant was no better: in 1698 the estate was loaned to Tsar Peter I (1672–1725), whose three-month stay resulted in Evelyn’s receiving £350 in compensation for the damage caused. The young Russian who would be later known as Peter the Great had come to London, presumably on a student visa, to study shipbuilding and work as a carpenter at the adjacent royal dockyard.

After Evelyn’s death in 1706, his grandson inherited the estate, but it fell into disrepair and was broken up. In 1729 the house was demolished and a workhouse was built on the site. Over the next century this became a home for the poor, a penal transportation depot, an army recruiting centre and a clothing factory.

However, in 1869 his descendant William John Evelyn bought back as much of the estate as he could, and created a public garden named Sayes Court, plus a playground and almshouses. Nearby Evelyn Street, Sayes Court Street and Czar Street commemorate this history today.

In 1884 Evelyn approached Octavia Hill (1838–1912) with a proposal for Sayes Court gardens to be publicly owned and managed for the benefit of all. It was from this idea that the National Trust came into being, but sadly not until January 1895 by which time it too late to acquire Sayes Court (the Trust’s first property was Alfriston Clergy House, purchased in 1896 for £10).

At the outbreak of war in 1914 the site was requisitioned by the War Office and remained in Government hands until 1980 when the Ministry of Defence sold it to News International. This company sold it on to Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa in 2000.

The situation today

A campaign to recreate Evelyn’s Gardens was started in 2007 by local resident and archaeologist Karen Liljenberg – see link to ‘london’s lost garden’ below – and the Museum of London later carried out various archaeological digs, which were later backfilled.

Besides the heritage campaign, there are many other pressures to build community assets on the site, as well as low-cost housing and the Lenox project. One proposal is that part of the old Sayes Court site should be occupied by a new primary school.

“One of the major influences on the new master plan has been the history and the legacy of Sir John Evelyn,” said a spokesman for Hutchison Whampoa. “The proposals include plans for the incorporation of the remains of the old Manor into a new cultural and educational centre. While little remains of the actual gardens he laid out, his writings and ideas live on and will be used to guide all landscape design.”

We shall see. Negotiations between the developers and Lewisham Council have not been friendly. Mayor of London Boris Johnson is now involved and has ‘called in’ HW’s planning application. Full details of the current situation are on the Deptford Is link below.

Further information:

http://www.wmf.org.uk/wmf_watch/watch_2014_uk_sites/

http://www.deptfordis.org.uk/2013/11/mayor-of-london-takes-over-planning.html

http://londonslostgarden.wordpress.com/

An eerie November story by Don Cooper

I have been adding old newsletters to the HADAS web site for some time, but I was intrigued by the article below which was published in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in its issue of November 4, 1983. The article was reprinted in HADAS newsletter no 164 December 1984. The Grecian style mausoleum of Philip Rundell is referred to as “The Dracula Tomb” in R. H. Somes book “The Evolution of St Mary’s Church Hendon” page 257 published by him in 2007. I thought the article deserved re-printing.

THE ORIGINS OF DRACULA by Philip Temple

‘And then …. He took a key from his pocket and held it up. And then we spend the night, you and I, in the churchyard where Lucy lies. This is the key that locks the tomb. I had it from the coffin-man to give to Arthur.’ My heart sank within me, for I felt that there was some fearful ordeal before us. I could do nothing, however, so I plucked up what heart I could and said that we had better hasten, as the afternoon was passing …”

As readers of Dracula – rather than viewers of Dracula films – know some of the tale’s most bizarre action takes place in a churchyard near London. Lucy Westenra, who falls victim to the Count and becomes one of the Un-Dead, is entombed in the family mausoleum at ‘Kingstead.’ By day she sleeps in her coffin: After dusk she preys on small children in the Hampstead neighbourhood. Several such children are found, one of them on “the Shooter’s Hill side of Hampstead Heath each has been bitten in the throat. It is in the Westenra tomb that her fiance Arthur Holmwood –helped by Professor;Van Helsing, Dr.Seward and Quincey P Morris – exorcises her soul by putting a stake through her heart and cutting off her head.

It has generally been thought that Stoker’s model for ‘Kingstead Churchyard’ was Highgate Cemetery but this theory is soon disproved. In the process some interesting light was thrown on Stoker’s sources for the story

Factual accuracy of geography and even train timetables— characterises Dracula , a device which makes the story more credible to the reader. Stoker goes to some lengths to pinpoint Kingstead, and the place he evidently had in mind was Hendon, which lies between Hampstead and Kingsbury, and was still a large village in the 1890s.

Seward and Van Helsing set off about ten from Jack’s Straw’s Castle in Hampstead.“It was then very dark, and the scattered lamps made the darkness greater when we were once again outside their individual radius. The Professor had evidently noted the road we were to ‘go, for he went on unhesitatingly: but as for me, I was in quite a mix-up as to locality. As we went further, we met fewer and fewer people, till at last we were somewhat surprised when we met even the patrol of horse police going their usual suburban round. At last we reached the wall of the churchyard, which we climbed over.”

As Seward refers to, Jack Straw’s Castle and later to the Spaniards Inn familiarly enough, it is obvious that they were not going to Highgate: the road would have taken them past the Spaniard’s, in which case Seward would have known the way. Nor can they have been crossing the Heath to Highgate because there were street lamps on the way. Nor can they have been going to Hampstead churchyard (which does resemble the description of the church­yard at Kingstead): as this would have meant going further into Hampstead village. The inference is that they were going along North End Road, through Golder’s Green and along Brent Street to Hendon parish church. The route was straightforward, once the right direction had been taken at the inn. The area was still largely countryside. Evelyn Waugh, writing of his childhood at North End, described Golders Green as having been ‘a grassy crossroad with a sign pointing to London’, Finchley and Hendon; such a place as where ‘the Woman in White’ was encountered. By the 1890s Hendon was large and growing: 1,400 houses in 1879; 2,636 in 1893, the year in which Dracula is set. It was said in 1894 that Hendon. ‘though within seven miles of St Giles’ Church, retains much of the aspect of an old Middlesex village. An exquisite view is seen from the churchyard …London might be hundreds of miles away, and the village-like church strengthens the illusion.’.

Near the east end of St Mary’s is the tomb of Philip Rundell, who died in 1827. This tomb described by the architect W P Griffith in 1838 ‘as a massive mausoleum constructed of stone’ must have been the model for the Westenra tomb in Dracula. Mausoleums, of course, are rare buildings in churchyards. Although other nearby churchyards contain plenty of vaults, they have no actual mausoleums.

It would have taken only about an hour to reach Hendon from the inn, a ‘distance of about three miles. This fits in well with Stoker’s times, for it was just midnight when Seward and van Helsing, having opened Lucy’s coffin and found it empty, took up their hiding places in the churchyard to await the return of the UnDead.

Despite alterations to the church by Temple Moore in the early twentieth century, the general look of the churchyard is much as it was when -the sculptor and one-time Pre-Raphaelite Thomas Woolner was buried there in 1892: “The graves are sheltered from the blasts by spreading cedars, ancient yews, and lovely evergreen trees. The old church walls are covered ‘with ivy, and there is an avenue of limes arched overhead, from the entrance gates to the south door.” Ivy and lime-trees have gone, but the village churchyard character remains. Even in Stoker’s day it was something of a survival. There were large buildings overlooking the churchyard, which was hardly the remote place described in Dracula:

“Lucy lies in the tomb of her kin, a lordly death-house in a lonely churchyard, away from teeming London; where the air is fresh, and the sun rises over Hampstead Hill, and where wild flowers grow of their own accord.”

Incidentally, the sun as seen from the churchyard does rise over Hampstead. This would not be the case with Highgate Cemetery, which lies east of Hampstead.

Stoker may well have had some link with Hendon, perhaps through, Woolner who had lived at St Peter’s Ouvroir in Brent Street. Stoker knew Rossetti, and lived near him in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Sir Hall Caine, who was, after Sir Henry Irving, probably Stoker’s closest associate, was one of Rossetti’s closest friends, and his companion until Rossetti died in 1882. It has been credibly suggested that Caine may have written the final draft of Dracula for Stoker. There may well have been a closer link with Hendon: the Hendon & Finchley Times reported as local news in 1893 the publication of a souvenir booklet to mark Henry Irving’s revival of King Lear at the Lyceum where Stoker was manager. At all events, Hendon was a convenient location for ‘Kingstead.’ But something happened at the churchyard in 1828 which may well have been Stoker’s inspiration for the exorcism in the first place, which he then fitted into the story and turned into a classic piece of vampire horror:

“Arthur took the stake and hammer, and when once his mind was set on action his hands never trembled or even quivered. Van Helsing opened his missal and began to read, and Quincey and I followed as well as we could Arthur placed the point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its dint in the white flesh. Then he struck with all his might. The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed to­gether till the lips were cut and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his un-trembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was, set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; .the sight of it gave courage so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault.”

The first part of the exorcism over, Lucy’s head was severed and the mouth stuffed with garlic.

In November 1828 a man called Holm of an old Hendon family asked the vicar’s permission to open a vault in the churchyard of St Mary’s. His son, a Medical student, wanted to collect up bones in the vault. Eventually the vicar agreed to allow the vault to be opened for just an hour the next morning. The coffins, he said, were not to be tampered with. But at 7.30 in the morning a local saw three men in the vault. One of them – ­the medical student Henry Holm – pulled the shroud off a body, then cut off the head which he put into a bag. The body was his mother’s: she had died about twenty years before. Holm and his companions – the sexton’s son and a man called Wood. – were found guilty of breaking open the vault and sever­ing a head from one of the bodies ‘to the outrage of public decency’. Because their purpose was allegedly scientific – Holm wanted to carry out a phrenological examination with a view to tracing a hereditary disorder – they got off fairly leniently. Holm was fined £50, the others £5 each. The vault in question was near the Rundell mausoleum, and the inscription can still be read. Henry Haley Holm died at 39 in 1846, his mother Hannah Maria died at 36 in 1809.

Did Stoker know this story? The chances are that he did. It was pub­lished as an item of interest in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 1892. On the same page was a long ‘rave’ review, with illustrations, of Irving’s pro­duction of King Lear at the Lyceum. The play ‘evoked one of the heartiest and most spontaneous demonstrations of unalloyed satisfaction ever heard within the walls of the Lyceum’. As Irving’s manager, Stoker would almost certainly have seen the review and therefore no doubt the Hendon story. This would explain not only the name Holmwood, but why the churchyard at Kingstead figures in the novel at all. The similarity of the factual and fictional events is obvious. In one case a son cuts his mother’s head off, to trace an hereditary disorder, in the other a man helps to cut off his fiancee’s head to cure another disorder. In fact, Stoker puts far more emphasis on cutting off the head than on the staking of the body, although the staking is the thing most people remember:

“‘Good God!’ he cried. What do you mean? Has there been any mistake? Has she been buried alive?’ He groaned in anguish that not even hope could soften.

‘I did not say she was alive, my child; I did not think it. I go no further than to say that she might be Un-Dead.’

‘Un-Dead! Not alive! What do you mean? Is this all a nightmare, or what is it?’

‘There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part. Believe me, we are now on the verge of one.

But I have not done. May I cut off the head of dead Miss Lucy?'”

A final curious point concerns the child found on the ‘Shooter’s Hill side’ of Hampstead Heath. Shooter’s Hill, of course, is miles away from Hampstead across the Thames. Surely what was intended was the ‘Shoot-up Hill side.’ ‘Shoot-up Hill is the stretch of the Edgware Road going north from Kilburn, just to the west of Hampstead. In the 1890s the fringes of the Heath extended almost to this point, certainly as far as West Hampstead and the Hampstead Cemetery at Fortune Green. It was therefore in this area that the child was found. This reinforces the idea that Lucy Westenra was entombed up the road in Hendon. But it also seems to be a reference to Wilkie Collins’s novel “The Woman in White” Stoker was clearly influenced by the book, particularly in his use of letters and diary extracts to form the narrative. There are other interesting similarities: the stories both involve private asylums, for instance (they also have villains known as ‘the Count’). It was on the Shoot-up Hill side of Hampstead that Walter Hartright first met the Woman in White. Stoker must have known this, and Lucy would, of course, have been dressed in white grave clothes. The link must have been in his mind.

Even without final proof it seems likely that part of the inspiration for Dracula came not only from books and tales from Transylvania, which have always been known as its sources, but from something that happened in Hendon churchyard in 1828.

Perhaps it is as well that by then the HADAS project of recording the inscriptions in Hendon churchyard had been completed. Otherwise we might have found volunteer recorders rather thin on the ground, specially towards dusk! With the tale of Henry Holm (not to mention Lucy Westenra) Hendon churchyard in the gloaming takes on a certain creepiness.

A new dinosaur on the block – Scientists tackle the 24ft King of Gore

A relative of Tyrannosaurus rex with knife-like teeth and eyes made for hunting has been given the title ‘King of Gore’.

The 24ft long, 2.5 ton carnivore lived 80 million years ago, about twelve million years before Tyrannosaurus rex. Its outstanding features were a wide rear skull, short narrow snout and forward-looking eyes. Scientists named the creature Lythronax argestes, which can be translated as King of Gore of the Southwest, in reference to its fierce appearance and where it was found.

The predator, which like Tyrannosaurus rex stood on two legs, inhabited Laramidia, a land mass formed on the western coast of a shallow sea that once split North America in half. Its remains were found in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a 1.9 million-acre desert region in southwest USA that has yielded a treasure trove of fossils.

Dr Mark Loewen, from the University of Utah, who led a study of Lythronax published in the online scientific journal PLOS One, said: “The width of the back of the skull of Lytronax allowed it to see with an overlapping field of view, giving it binocular vision, very useful for a predator and a condition we associate with T. rex.”

Adapted by Stewart Wild from Nature Notes in the Daily Telegraph, 7 November 2013.

Buxton Trip

One of the keys to a successful trip is the selection of the hotel. We try to find a one with 40 to 50 rooms so that we have most of the rooms. We have found that the Best Western group have hotels which meet this and also have comfortable lounges, good food, helpful staff and some history. Our trip this year was based at The Lee Wood Hotel, Manchester Road, Buxton.

Rain played a part in our schedule. Fortunately, a number of our visits did not need to be booked, so we were able to juggle and stay mainly dry.

Our Hotel Lydia Stanners

The Lee Wood is very pleasant hotel, set in its own grounds in the spa town of Buxton. The Town Centre itself and the Buxton Pump are a few minutes’ walk down a slope. Once a popular Spa venue, patronised until WWII, Buxton has gradually declined. However, many of the town’s premier buildings have been, or are, undergoing refurbishment due to monies from the National Lottery, Derbyshire County Council and a hotel company amongst others.

The Hotel itself has everything one could wish for. The rooms were spacious, properly furnished with period or reproduction furniture and well-appointed bathrooms. New carpeting to its common parts have lifted its status Free Wi-Fi, TV, large bar, good food and staff that couldn’t do enough for us kept everyone happy.

The Millican/Longden family who own this hotel believe that it was built as three Lodging Houses between 1830-1832. However, the On Line Charges Register notes that on 12 October 1860 a Conveyance of Land was made between the said William, 7th Duke of Devonshire and Brian Bates, then owner of the Old Hall Hotel, Buxton together with a third party William Currey. Brian Bates agreed in the Deed to build three dwelling houses, stables, coach houses and offices to carry on his trade as Lodging House Keeper. The conveyance also includes any building standing on the land, so perhaps some part of the hotel or outbuilding does date earlier. No positive information could be gleaned as to when the houses were converted into a hotel although speculatively this might have taken place when the grandfather of the current owners bought the property probably in the mid-20th century. More information could be obtained by way of the full Deed available by appointment at Nottingham Land Registry and the local council who would have plans.

The family told me that the furniture and ceramics in the reception areas and staircases have always been on the premises and seem to be reasonably contemporary with the buildings history. They have no knowledge of these items as the information died with their Grandfather. Certainly their age would tie in with that of the trio of lodging houses as there are three oak long case clocks on the half landings that date from around 1800.

Also seen were three heavy and dark oak dressers hiding on the lower ground floor, possibly early twentieth century. Other pieces that caught my eye were a very attractive mahogany circa1800’s Cellaret on the first half landing and the King and Queen Hall Chairs beside a bureau at the entrance that may be arts and crafts echoes of a 17thC design. Also very pleasing was the bird roundel, late 19thC set inside a later stained glass panel.

On the first floor stands an attractive large walnut display cabinet, possibly remade from a wardrobe sometime in the last century. This houses the Hotel’s collection of Staffordshire figurines and Majolica ware, together with a variety of vases and ceramic pieces dating between the 18thC -early 20thC. The Art collection was eclectic, mainly 19thC but had other themes in various corridors. The Lee Wood is more than an Hotel; it is a house of hidden treasures.

Temple Mine Stewart Wild

We gathered at the Peak District Mining Museum (see write-up in last month’s newsletter) in Matlock Bath and split into two groups for the visit to Temple Mine nearby. Half our group enjoyed refreshments and browsing in the Museum, while the others, led by our young guide Adam, crossed the road and climbed the short distance up the lane to the mine entrance.

We donned hard hats and listened to a short safety briefing. The adit was lit, not too wet, and only a few of us banged our heads as we filed along the narrow tunnel. Adam explained the history of the mine, the methods and tools used, the way the ore was found and extracted and what happened to it afterwards.

The principal ores mined here were galena, the natural mineral form of lead sulphide, and fluorite – also known as fluorspar – a form of calcium fluoride. These minerals have a huge range of industrial uses but they are widely found in many countries like the USA and Australia where extraction on a vast scale has meant that Temple Mine, which opened in 1922, had to close some years ago because it was uneconomic.

Adam outlined the various methods of extraction employed by the miners, aided by displays of old tools and equipment including small trucks that were filled with ore from a chute and hauled on rails along the adit to the outside. Pick marks on the rock walls attested to one method known by the curious name of ‘nicking’.

Having enjoyed what was, for some of our members, their first mining experience, we were soon back in the fresh air by the entrance, where the rest of our group were waiting.

Stoke-on-Trent. The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. Audrey Hooson

This museum won the ARTFUND Museum of the Year award in 1982. As you arrive it is easy to see why. Built on a sloping site, the front elevation is quite low. However this has a magnificent brick frieze 33m long that takes advantage of this. Designed by Frank Maurier and made by G.H.Downing & co. it uses more than 6,000 bricks of different coloured clays to illustrate pottery-making scenes.

Unfortunately the Staffordshire Hoard exhibition had transferred to Birmingham for a few months; it was a joint purchase. However, the museum had so much to offer that we needed all our time to do it justice. The Director claims that ‘THERE IS SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE HERE’ and this would be difficult to challenge. In the entrance hall there is a ceramic statue of THE STAFFORDSHIRE SAXON, about 4 metres tall, designed by Andy Edwards and modelled in the Wedgewood museum. His motto is ‘Annys Bid Strengo’

The FOOTBALL TRAIL featured local hero Stanley Matthews 1915 – 2000.

The SPITFIRE GALLERY had one of the 230 surviving examples of this plane, suspended from the ceiling, in front of a film of others in the air. The designer, Reginald Mitchell CBE was born in Stoke.

The ARCHAEOLOGICAL GALLERY displayed mostly locally excavated finds. These included the Wetton Mill Minor rock shelter, from Mesolithic flints to tin cans. 18th century pottery sites and Ecclesfield Castle, the medieval palace of the Bishops of Lichfield.

The ART GALLERY was founded in 1924 with the bequest by Dr. John Russell of his collection, largely of early 20th century British art, Henry Moore, Wyndham Lewis, Arthur Berry, Grete Marks and others. This has been expanded since to contain a print collection, pottery designs and also paintings by the Glasgow Boys.

For most of HADAS the high point of our visit was the CERAMICS GALLERY. Having merged several smaller museums it houses the world’s largest collection of Staffordshire ceramics. All the displays were well lit and labelled with an emphasis on how the items were made and also, what an important part of the history and economy of Staffordshire ceramics are. Historic and imported wares that influenced the trade were also shown.

In addition to the wares made for domestic use the gallery includes large exhibition pieces intended to show technical expertise. A life-size peacock and a Renaissance-revival style garden centrepiece, made by Minton & Co. of earthenware with majolica decoration, were particularly striking.

In the education area a case contained 667 different cow creamers, from the mid -1700s to the present. Certainly something that children will remember.

This museum needs several visits, I didn’t view the Natural or Local History galleries but our afternoon was definitely ‘SOMETHING FOR EVERONE’.

From HADAS Newsletter No. 212 November 1988:

MEDIEVAL EDGWARE: THE HOSPITALLERS ESTATE OF EDGWARE BOYS

The medieval, and later, history of Edgware is particularly complicated because the township was split between different manors and parishes. The primary evidence can therefore be hard to unravel, and this is reflected in the standard authorities, up to and including the Victoria County History of Middlesex.

The Barnet archives has recently acquired photocopies of the pages from the Hospitallers’ cartulary in the British Library (MS Cotton Nero E VI vol 1 ff.80-83v) relating to their estates in Edgware. The cartulary was compiled: in the mid-15c but the ten items which it includes date back at least another hundred years. Although it is cited in the standard authorities, the full extent of the information which it provides has not been realised.

The first five items trace the descent of a house and acre of land from the time when the Hospitallers granted it away to Hugo de la Hegge in the late 13c or early 14c until it returned to them in the will of Sayer de Stevenage, chaplain of Edgware, in 1375. The deeds make it absolutely clear that although Sayer was chaplain of St Margaret’s, Edgware, the house was on the Little Stanmore side of the Edgware Road, in the parish of St. Lawrence. The VCH (vol iv, pl64) seems to suggest that it was the vicarage house next to St Margaret’s.

The will of Sayer is as follows:

“In the name of God amen, on Thursday in the feast of St Matthew the apostle (21 September)1374 I Sayer de Stevenach chaplain make my testament in this form. First I bequeath my soul to God the omnipotent and to all the saints and my body to be buried in the parish church of Edgware. Item I leave to the light of the blessed Margaret there half a mark. Item to the fabric of the church of Whitchurch 3s4d. Item to the church of Hendon 2s. Item to the church of Elstree 2s. Item I give and bequeath my house with garden, dovehouse and meadow to the prior and convent of St John at Clerkenwell. Item I bequeath my black book or breviary with a sufficient portion of my other goods to a suitable priest to celebrate (masses) for my soul for a full year. Item I bequeath to Emmot the wife of Nicholas atte Wode the two best cows with the best pitcher and small pitcher and the best salt-pan (patella). Item I bequeath to the said Emmot 10s of gold or silver. Item I bequeath to Sayer Ounde six silver spoons. Item I leave the other spoons to the said Emmot. Item to Sayer Presgate 2s. Item I bequeath to each of my sons (filiorum) 6d. The residue of my unbequeathed goods I bequeath to Walter Baker and Nicholas atte Wode whom I appoint my executors that they may arrange and dispose for my soul as seems to them most expedient.”

The will, which was proved in January 1375, seems to have led to an immediate dispute, and in July the Official of the Archdeacon of Middlesex summoned the two custodians (churchwardens) of Edgware and Sayer’s executors to attend a hearing. Unfortunately we are not told the grounds of the dispute or the verdict.

In 1395 the prior again granted out Sayer’s messuage, but this time instead of alienating it on a permanent basis he only granted it out to farm for 20 years, to the then farmer of the whole manor of Edgware Boys, “Two years later the whole manor, including the chapel of Edgware, was let out on a new farm for 10 years. The farmer had to find and maintain a suitable chaplain for St Margaret’s, and keep both the manor buildings and the chancel of the church in good repair.

It was presumably because of the impending farm that the manor was surveyed, and the resulting Extent is the next item, unfortunately rather too long to be reproduced here. It lists 12 fields of arable, totalling 235 acres, 4 meadows totalling 7 acres, and 14 acres of Boysgrove. Three tenants were holding houses with gardens, one tenant a cottage and another a loft, garden and croft. The manor also had all the tithes. Annual outgoings were a rent of 7s7d on 100 acres of land originally purchased from Roger Stronge; 33s 4d to the chaplain of Edgware together with a suitable house and garden, and altarage; 6d at Easter for consecrated bread; 3s 4d for bread, milk and cheese at Boys on rogation days (presumably for sustenance to those beating the manor bounds); and another 3s 4d in bread, wine and wax for celebrating masses.

The cartulary does not tell us when or how the Hospitallers acquired their manor of Edgware Boys. No earlier reference to it as a manor has been found than in the farm of 1395 recorded above. The VCH (vol iv p157) states cautiously that it may have originated from a known grant of land made in 1231/8. An Extent of the main manor of Edgware which was made in 1277 records 7s7d rent due from the Hospitallers of the Wood (Public Record Office SC 11 296, published in LAMAS Transactions NS vol vii, 1933). The 1397 Extent of Boys (a corruption of bois or wood) makes it plain that this was the 100 acres added by purchase and not, as the editors of the 1277 Extent wrongly assumed, the full manor. This is not, however, proof either way since a completely separate manor would not have been mentioned.

The cartulary also fails to provide a firm early date for St Margaret’s. Again, though, it gives the earliest that we have, in the implication that Sayer de Stevenage was already its chaplain in 1362. It is interesting that the uncertain status of St Margaret’s, whether a chapel (of Kingsbury), or a full-scale parish church, which was long-continuing, is reflected here. 

Number 512 November 2013 Edited by Micky Watkins

HADAS DIARY 2013 & 2014

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 12th November, 8pm The Lions on Kunulua: excavations of the Early Bronze and Iron Age periods at Tell Ta’yinat, Hatay, Turkey -this is an occupation mound site near the ancient city of Antioch (Antakya) adjacent to the Syrian border. Since the late 1990s, Prof Tim Harrison of the University of Toronto has led survey and excavation work on the mound and the surrounding area of the lower tell with some spectacular results especially over the past few years – large statuary with many intact, a temple site, cuneiform tablet fragments and an almost-complete extremely rare treaty document, and many fragments of Luwian script. A metal working site and lots of artefacts of the textile production that took place on this site have also been uncovered along with evidence of trade with groups on the Indian Ocean, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean; all have shown the importance of Tell Ta’yinat. The site was formerly known at Kunalua during the Neo-Hittite/Aramean periods and is referred to as Calneh in the Old Testament. Lecture by Dr. Fiona Houghey who has worked with Tim Harrison for 10 years on this site.

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.

Tuesday 14th January 2014, 8pm The Naval Graveyards of Greenwich. Lecture by Malcolm Godfrey

Tuesday 11th February 2014 To be announced.

Tuesday 11th March 2014, 8pm The Sandridge Coin Hoard. Lecture by David Thorold, Curator (Prehistory to Medieval), Verulamium Museum.

Tuesday 8th April 2014, 8pm Restoring House Mill (working title) Brian James-Strong, River Lea Tidal Mill Trust.

Reminder of London & Middlesex Archaeological Society (LAMAS) Local History Conference

These details were also in the last Newsletter, but here’s a reminder for what promises to be a very interesting occasion: LAMAS’s 48th Local History Conference at the Weston Theatre, Museum of London on Saturday, 16th November 2013 from 10.00am to 4.00 pm. This all-day conference on the subject of “The River and Port of London” will have, as usual, displays by local history societies throughout the day.

Tickets are available now. The cost is £12 per person if paid before the 31st October, or £15 per person from 1st November. Ticket applications to: Eleanor Stanier, LAMAS Local History Conference, 48 Coval Road, East Sheen, London SW14 7RL enclosing a cheque payable to LAMAS and a stamped addressed envelope for the tickets, or via the LAMAS website (www.lamas.org.uk/localhistory) using Paypal.

Brigitte Hay Jim Nelhams

Back in July, we noticed a brief notice in our local newspaper (Barnet Times) recording the death of Brigitte Hay, a name which rang a bell. The cremation date, which was some while later, was noted. We remembered Brigitte coming on some of the HADAS outings, often with Renate Koenigsberger. Brigitte had bad eyesight and used what looked like a small telescope to read. I recall them both on our long visit to Plymouth. Both ladies had allowed their membership to lapse.

Jo and I attended the cremation service on behalf of HADAS, and there, we learned that Renate had died in 2012. A number of Renate’s family were also at the service, and a cousin, Sophia Kingshill, has kindly provided the following information. A fuller obituary written by another cousin, Gustav Born, appeared in The Guardian on 17th June 2012 (and available on the internet), noting that Max Born, Renate’s uncle was a Nobel Prize winner, and also that Max was also the grandfather of the singer, song-writer and actress Olivia Newton-John. Further information about Brigitte will follow.

Renate Koenigsberger Sophia Kingshill

Renate was born in 1919, the only child of a talented artist, Wolfgang Born, who was half-brother of the famous physicist Max Born. She lived in the German town of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) until the 1930s, when she and her mother moved to Britain to escape the Nazi regime.

She studied chemistry, gained her PhD, and became a lecturer at Surrey University. In 1957 she married her cousin Otto Koenigsberger, with whom she had had a friendship going back to childhood. Otto was an architect with an international reputation, and he and Renate travelled extensively in Asia and Africa. They were well informed about history and archaeology, and collected fascinating artefacts in their travels, including a stone Buddha, rescued from a demolished shrine in India, that was displayed on the wall of their Hampstead home.

After Otto’s death in 1993, Renate continued to be the centre of a wide circle of friends and family from all over the world. Her house was full of pictures and books on almost every subject, and she was always interested in and knowledgeable about politics, history, art, architecture and archaeology.

Renate and Otto had been friendly for some time with Brigitte and Michael Hay, and after Michael’s death, Renate and Brigitte became close companions who shared cultural interests and went on holiday together. The friendship meant a lot to both of them.

South American road trip – a post script Tim Wilkins

The archaeological activity in Northern Peru is so vibrant that there are stunning new finds happening all the time. Archaeologists are even flying drones in order to survey their sites, find new sites, and keep a watch out for looters. Here are a few of the discoveries just since we were there in the summer.

El Brujo (see HADAS newsletter no. 510, September 2013)

Continuing excavations at the site of three Moche pyramids have found the remains of a young woman. Unusually she was buried alone – the other burials at the site have been of royal women with servants and guards – with no grave goods, and buried face down pointing out to the ocean. Aged between 17 and 19, she shows no signs of strangulation or other injuries.

Panamarca, Ancash province. In July in the Ancash region of North West Peru, an excavation at another Moche site has found a shield of woven basketry with a handle and covered with feathers, originally about a hundred, of which only a dozen survive. Moche shields are generally quite small; this one being some 10 inches in diameter. The Moche lived in the coastal desert area, but the feathers are Thought to be from Macaws, so must have been imported over the Andes from the Amazonas region.

An unlooted Wari tomb.

Also in the Ancash region, and briefly touched on in the September newsletter, an untouched Wari (also spelled Huari) tomb was found earlier this year and more details are now being released. The Wari culture dates from around 1000 AD up to the arrival of the Inca, and they were probably a rival to the Moche (see above). This coastal site at El Castillo de Huarmey (“The Castle of Death”) has produced over 1000 artefacts including gold and silver jewellery, bronze axes, and gold weaving tools, as well as three Wari queens and 60 other individuals. Like the Moche when they buried a queen, they seem to have buried her with a number of female servants, and, at a slightly different level in the chambers, male guards. The team estimate that they have at least another 8 to 10 years work at the site.

Chavin de Huantar (Also see HADAS newsletter no. 510 September 2013)

Two more carved heads have been found at the site, to go with the 100 already discovered. These are thought to have been part of a row along the top of a wall that fell down and were buried during an earthquake. Like the ones pictured in the September article, these seem to show a human head, maybe that of a priest, as it is transformed under the influenced of powerful hallucinogenic hypnotics such as that from the San Pedro cactus. These were used in rituals to help the priest pass from the human world into the spirit world, during which their heads would take on features of animals and birds. The two new heads have bulging staring eyes and flared nostrils, also a sign of San Pedro use, and are covered with wrinkles and a dozen snakes.

And finally . . . The Atacama Desert in Northern Chile is known as the driest place on Earth, with no rainfall at all for decades on end, and with zero atmospheric moisture, which is why so many astronomical observatories are situated there. The picture below was sent to me a couple of weeks ago from a contact of mine – the Atacama under snow!

Buxton Trip – Day 1 Jim Nelhams

Off we go on the 2013 HADAS long outing. This year, 40 people joined the coach, with driver Garry, for our trip to Buxton and the Peak District. All aboard, we headed north with a brief comfort stop en route to Piddington and Papplewick. One of our objectives for these trips is to find places that members don’t know, or would not visit on their own. HADAS has been to Piddington before, but Papplewick has not featured in previous outings.

Piddington Roman Villa Don Cooper

For our first stop we arrived at Piddington, a little village six miles South-East of Northampton. Here we were met by Roy Friendship-Taylor, his wife Liz and members of the Upper Nene Archaeological Society (UNAS). We divided into two groups, with one group walking the half mile or so to the site where Roy explained the history of the site and the interpretation of the current (2013) excavation, the other group went to the museum. The museum is full of artefacts found on the site and the volunteers from UNAS provided us with tea and coffee, biscuits and beautiful lemon drizzle cake!

Roy and his team have been excavating the known Roman Villa site since 1979. As a result, the Piddington excavation has provided a comprehensive view of the development of the villa from an early Iron Age settlement, through the early Roman military period and on through the various stages of the villa’s development. HADAS Vice President Andrew Selkirk in his article on Piddington referred to the excavation as one of the best explored Roman villas in the country (Selkirk (ed.) 1996. Current Archaeology Vol. X111 page 2). Roy’s great enthusiasm for what is a life’s work is infectious and despite it being chilly, we all hung on to his every word as he guided us round the excavation (see photo)

The Piddington Roman villa is a great example of an archaeological research project being carried out by an amateur archaeology group (UNAS) and led by a very knowledgeable and charismatic leader. The museum of the excavation is housed in a disused Wesleyan chapel. It contains thousands of the artefacts found on the site with many of the most interesting ones on display. Once the group visiting the site returned to the museum we “changed ends” so to speak.

There is also an interesting-looking Victorian Church in the village but being Sunday morning there was a service taking place so few of us got a chance to visit it. The site deserves a full day’s visit as we only scratched the surface – perhaps a HADAS trip next year?

Papplewick Pumping Station Jo Nelhams

This is yet another situation when a piece of History is being maintained and preserved for future generations by enthusiastic volunteers. Papplewick Pumping Station was constructed to increase the water supply to Nottingham, which is eleven miles away, as the city expanded during Victorian times. It is an example of the splendid engineering projects which continued the expansion of the Industrial Revolution. It is one of Britain’s finest Water Works and the only one in the Midlands to be preserved as a complete working fresh water pumping station. It was built between 1882 and 1884 and the two massive beam engines are thought to be the last built by the famous firm of James Watt & Co. of Soho Works, Birmingham and London. It is now a Grade 2 star listed building. There are two main rooms, the boiler room and the machine room. The boiler room houses six large Lancashire boilers. Three boilers were needed to be fired in order to feed steam to the beam engines.

As you enter the machine room you are greeted by an elaborately decorated room. The stained glass windows all have water related designs and the pillars supporting the upper floors have magnificent gold coloured bird figures resembling ibises at ceiling level. The building was completed eight hundred pounds under budget, so this spare money was spent on decoration. As the pumps are an integral part of the building, a vertical spirit level is checked regularly to make sure there has been no movement to upset the balance of the machinery. On display were some huge spanners which needed tremendous physical strength to even lift, let alone use. The beam engines worked for 85 years and ceased regular operation in 1969. Papplewick’s upkeep is now in the hands of an enthusiastic bunch of volunteers. It was opened to the public in 1975 and some of the volunteers are the original founders of the preservation group to supplement the income, the pond outside is now used by a local fish farm for breeding carp. Another novel way for raising funds is that the building is licensed for weddings. There was still some evidence of a wedding that had taken place on the previous day.

The pumps were not in steam on our visit, but some members expressed the desire to return to witness the pumps in operation.

Up to the Heights and Down to the Depths Deidre Barrie

Our coach sped to Matlock Bath in better weather, to visit the Heights of Abraham. In 1724 Daniel Defoe wrote that Matlock Bath had “a base, stony, mountainous road to it, and no good accommodation when you are there.” Luckily times have changed.

Britain’s first alpine cable car system was opened to the public in 1984. Cable cars each carrying six passengers took us high above the River Severn up to Masson Hill. The Hill (1,111 ft above sea level) was renamed the Heights of Abraham after its supposed similarity to the site of General James Wolf’s victory in Canada (where the 1759 battle site is known as the Plains of Abraham).

For those in our party who did not fancy the cable car ride or the visit to the Great Masson Cavern, there was an exhibition centre with films of these perils to watch in comfort as well as “The Fossil Factory”, a shop, and a terrace café with spectacular views.

The Great Masson Cavern was formerly a lead mine, and opened to the public in 1844 when the deposits of lead declined. Lead has been mined here for centuries – a pig block of lead exists with a Roman inscription on it. This was an adventure – we wore hard hats and had to stoop almost double to trudge along low tunnels with wet floors. A state of the art lighting system in the huge main cavern went from complete darkness, to demonstrating the tiny lights the miners would have used, then to a pretty coloured light show. Names and dates from the 18th Century were visible on the rugged sides of the mine where the owners of seams had wanted to stake their ownership. Back to Buxton with time for a quick look at the local museum.

The Peak Mining Museum at Matlock Bath. Simon Williams

The Museum is housed in the Pavilion building of the former pump-room from when it was a Spa, alongside the Derwent River. The mining history begins with the Romans, some 2,000 years ago. Galena (lead ore) was what was extracted.

On entering one is impressed by short simulated hewn rock galleries, with trucks, which can be passed along. There are a few working models for ‘button-pushers’, there are good displays, and the museum displays a fine array of tools. Ancient Laws controlled the miners. It was a thrill to see a Trevithick (1771-1833) pumping engine here. Trevithick was also the first builder of a full-scale working steam railway loco in 1804. It is an interesting paradox to move water, in the form of steam, to remove water! The Museum also had a good display of the tools and materials involved in the dynamiting process to access new seams. At the end there was a fine display of minerals clearly shown. A good Museum.

Barnet Then & Now – Published 1/11/2013 Don Cooper

96 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0752488325, pub. The History Press, £14.99

Yasmine Webb, the former collections manager of Barnet Local Studies, has created a very attractive book, rich with images, of Barnet past and present.

Many of the images that have been captured show familiar sites of today that can be compared with their predecessors, effectively illustrating how Barnet, despite undergoing many changes, has still managed to retain its historic identity. The charming geographical layout of the highest hills and adjoining valleys of north London create fantastic views that have been well documented by numerous artists and writers.

Choosing the images that give the architecture its merit was both a challenge and a labour of love due to the size and topography of the borough.

Barnet was not an industrial borough, but from 1910 small pockets of industry developed providing employment and bringing communities together, such as Aeronautics in Hendon, STC Telephones and Cables in Friern Barnet and Simms Motor Units of East Finchley.

This enjoyable, colourful and informative book adds considerably to the collection of published material on Barnet.

The photographs, taken by the author, have been reproduced very attractively by The History Press.

Discounted copies will be obtainable from Paul Field (Area Sales Manager) for The History Press, the arrangement will be dependent on the number of copies bought, say over 5 copies.

Single copies can be bought from The History Press, offered on the Internet by various outlets or ordered from your local book shop

Exhibition at The Museum of London, The Cheapside Hoard: London’s Lost Jewels

On Until 27 April 2014. This treasure of late 16th and early 17th century jewels and gemstones was discovered in 1912, buried in a cellar on Cheapside in the City of London. Through new research and state-of-the-art technology, the exhibition will showcase the wealth of insights the Hoard offers on Elizabethan and Jacobean London – as a centre of craftsmanship and conspicuous consumption, at the crossroads of the Old and New Worlds. It will also explore the mysteries that remain, lost among the cataclysmic events of the mid-17th century: who owned the Hoard, when and why was it hidden, and why was it never reclaimed? Box office: 020 7001 9844. Adult £10 (£9 without donation), Concession £8 (£7 without donation)

Other Societies’ Events Eric Morgan
Sunday 1st December, 12-5pm. Barnet High St Christmas Fair. Music, Dance, Stalls and entertainment. Theatre in the Bull and Barnet Church 2.30pm. Exhibition at Barnet Museum.

Sunday 1st December , 10.30am. Heath and Hampstead Society. Meet in North End Way, on Hampstead side of Inverforth House, NW3. The Pergola, Hill Garden & Golders Hill Park. 2 hour walk led by Peter Tausig. £3.

Tuesday 3rd December, 2-3pm Harrow Museum, Headstone Manor, Pinner View N. Harrow HA26PX. English Churches and Cathedrals. Talk by Frank Weare. £3.

Tuesday 3rd December 1.00pm Gresham College at Museum of London. Modern Art in Churches. Talk by Lord Harries. Free.

Thursday 5th December. 7.30pm London Canal Museum, 12-13 New Wharf Rd., Kings X N1 9RT. Ice for the Metropolis. Talk by Malcolm Tucker. Admission £4, Concessions £3.

Thursday 5th December 8.00pm Pinner Local History Society, Village Hall, Chapel Lane car park, Pinner. British Windmills and Watermills. Talk by Barbara Lanning. £2.

Friday 6th and Saturday 7th December . 11am-12.30pm and 2.00-3.30pm LAARC, Mortimer Wheeler House, 46 Eagle Wharf Rd, N1 7ED. Eat, Drink and be Merry. Enjoy drinking like a Tudor or gorging like a Roman? Explore our collection of ancient dining ware and discover the strange eating habits of our ancestors. Book in advance £5 on www.museumofLondon.org.uk or phone 020 7001 9814.

Saturday 7th December 11.30am Highgate Society. Meet at Information Hut in Highgate Wood, off Archway Rd N6. Winter Guided Walk. (There were Roman kilns in Highgate Wood).

Tuesday 10th December 6.30pm LAMAS Clore Learning Centre, Museum of London. The Burnt Jubilee Book in the London of Richard II. Talk by Caroline Baron. £2. Refreshments from 6.00pm.

Tuesday 10th December 7.45pm Amateur Geological Society, The Parlour, St Margaret’s Church, Victoria Ave N3 1BD (off Hendon Lane). Stromatolites=Microbes Making Rocks. Talk by Dr Kenneth McNamara.

Wednesday 11th December 2.30-4pm Mill Hill Historical Society, Trinity Church, The Broadway NW7 Elstree – Britain’s Hollywood? Talk by Bob Redmond.

Wednesday 11th December 7.45pm Hornsey Historical Society, Union Church Hall, corner Ferme Park Rd/Weston Park N8 9PX. Dig For Victory. Talk by Russell Bowes. Visitors £2.

Thursday 12th December 7.30pm. Camden History Society, Burgh House, New End Sq NW3 1LT. St Paul’s – The Alternative. Talk by Dr Ann Saunders (HADAS member) with wine and mince pies from 7pm. Visitors £1.

Correction The item shown in the October Newsletter for Tuesday 26th November at 10.30pm should of course be 10.30am.

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.