‘What’s Happened to my Drive?’ (September the 28th at Bodkin Hall)

It was my birthday on Sunday the 28th of September. Most people on their birthday are content to sit in their rocking chair with a tumbler of Jack Daniels in one hand, a fat cigar in the other, and their feet up on the cat. (Well…that’s how my grandmother used to spend her birthdays at any rate.) Not me, though! I’m a consummate professional (i.e. a professional who consumes a lot) so I was up bright and early as always and off to Bodkin Hall, burying rare artefacts borrowed from the museum for people to accidentally discover later on and generally archaeologing.
And because it was my birthday I also allowed some of my millions of fans the once yearly privilege of taking my photograph. (Actually, that’s not true. The photograph below was taken by Dave Hammond the week before, but because he was going to be away on the 28th I was lenient with him.)
Before anybody starts, it’s a trenchcoat! We dig trenches. Therefore I wear a trenchcoat! It’s also got a lot pockets, which come in handy for stuff like chalk, tape measures, pencils, cigarettes, set squares, compasses, trowels, half eaten butties that still have enough filling left not to be thrown in a trench, etc.
Now, I’m not going to bore everyone solid with stratigraphic layers and stuff this week. Instead, I thought we’d take a look at some of the various bits and pieces (or ‘small finds’ as we in archaeological circles call them) that were unearthed throughout the day.
The first is the larger-than-average clay pipe stem shown in the scan below:
This one took us by surprise. The pipe stem at the bottom is big enough in its own right, being, most probably, one of the thicker variety made during the mid-to-late eighteenth centuries. The one at the top though looked as though it had elephantitus. A bit of research was required and here’s what we discovered at http://www.dawnmist.demon.co.uk/cadger.htm:

“They are called "Cadger" "Advertique" or "Novelty" pipes and were mainly made in England, France, Germany and Holland by a number of successful makers. Often these large pipes would be used as a display piece in the shop window of merchants selling tobacco related products. They were also bought and used by various smoking social clubs who would pass the pipe around the group (use in initiation ceremonies by some groups is also true).”

So now you know. One of the previous owners of Bodkin Hall was obviously a novelty clay pipe fancier and, quite possibly, a leading light in the Pilling Clay Pipe Smokers Society. (Bet they’d have problems at their meetings nowadays with the new ‘anti-smoking’ laws.)
The second object, or rather two objects, are illustrated in the scan below:
Incidentally, the plastic tie didn’t come with it. The whole paddle was starting to split down the middle, so we thought that we’d better conserve it before it went the same way as the wooden spherical object that came up by its side.
Any thoughts on what it might be yet? Well, leaving aside the somewhat fanciful notions of butter pats (they were more rectangular and grooved) and Neolithic hand mirrors (wrong millennia and not shiny enough really) it probably is exactly what it appears to be. A crudely made, child’s bat and ball. Obviously the Victorian/Edwardian owners of Bodkin Hall weren’t exactly loaded…or particularly good at woodwork.
Speaking of which, take a look at these:
We’ve found loads of these little round spheres. What was that? ‘Balls’? No, honestly, it’s true. As you can probably see from the numbers alongside them, they’ve been coming up in droves. They all measure between two centimetres and four centimetres in size, and there’s just too many of them to be coincidental.
We’ve had battery balls (whatever they were), perfectly round stones, glass bottle stoppers, even a musket ball.
Our conclusion is that, along with the homemade bat and ball, whatever child lived at Bodkin Hall during the Victorian/Edwardian period also had his own homemade marble set. It’s even possible that he was storing them in the thousands of broken Hartley’s marmalade jars we’ve been digging up.
All of which just goes to show that, regardless of the average aged Pilling resident’s insistence to the contrary, an Edwardian childhood in rural Wyre wasn’t necessarily as glamorous as legend has it.
Now I’m off for a game of Final Fantasy on my Nintendo DS.