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Brickyard Lane, Pt. I:
In the beginning.
THE LEGEND.
Most parts of the country probably have at least one dump which according to the legends would produce huge amounts of stuff, of legendary quality, if only it could be dug.
If it weren’t either built on, or owned by a psycho / patrolled by trained killer dogs / mined / all of the above, you’d only have to put your fork in the ground and out would pop 2 pint Warner's Safe Cures, pictorial slab seals, reform flasks and blue print bears grease lids. Often those rumours are based on stories of a half hour dig by one long-departed pioneer in early 1970s, or comments by a JCB driver, overheard in the pub after one too many just before closing time. Our own neck of the woods (Lincolnshire, and East and North Yorkshire) is no exception, with a couple of such ‘mother lode’ sites rumoured to exist.
In summer 2005, after spending far too long digging a frustrating and fairly unproductive late site in Market Rasen Darren and I decided that, in the spirit of nothing ventured, nothing gained, it was time to raise our sights. We would try for one of the really legendary local tips:
The Brickyard Lane dump!
This site was located at the side of a large pond; a former clay pit from a long-vanished brickyard. It had been known about since the 1970s but had never been dug properly, although there was a long history of digging attempts without permission. These furtive efforts generally resulted in holes left open, broken bottles chucked all over the place, and a landowner understandably hostile to bottle diggers. The site had, according to the rumour-mill, produced at least one local hybrid Codd bottle, and a number of local gingers, but was most famous for (rumour had it) having turned up several examples of one of the most sought after British transferred ginger beer bottles. Over the years this had given rise to stories of ‘dozens’ of gingers coming out on every dig, with rare Lincolnshire pictorials being more or less ten-a-penny.
After a typically fruitless and frustrating day of dump hunting we were driving home along the road that goes past the site and, on the spur of the moment, pulled over and walked across to it, trying to look as though we belonged there. As much as anything we just wanted to remind ourselves what a proper dump with some decent age to it actually looked like. This is what the pond looked like:
A lovely spot. And this is what the pond edge looked like:
Bottles everywhere, all dating to about 1900.
Looking at this we decided to try for permission in spite of the fact, universally acknowledged among local collectors, that it would be completely pointless. We already knew the name of the owner, so a letter went in the post, composed using our carefully honed and long-agonised-over introductory letter format. We fully expected the response to be a business-like version of ‘Bu**er off’, so we were pleasantly surprised when, instead, we had three months of correspondence backward and forward resulting, in late September, in the arrival of a letter saying something along the lines of ‘OK then, off you go’. There were a number of conditions attached, but even so there it was: permission!
THE FIRST DIGS.
September 24th 2005 was our first day of digging on the site. Excitement, or what? Darren couldn’t come along until the afternoon because of work commitments and so I rolled up by myself in mid morning to start a test trench. At this stage we had no idea how far back from the pond edge the tip extended, and so the plan was to start at the bank and dig a narrow trench into the field, as far as we could follow the tip in a single day.
Above: The edge of the tip just before starting the first trench. A hundred years of ducks climbing the bank in this spot have eroded a pile of bottles, jars and pots (as well as bricks!) out of the pond edge. This also shows part of the field alongside the tip. We had no clear idea how far the tip extended into the field (probe rods were not much use here because of the stony soil):
I got started and found almost 3 feet of rocky soil and clay cap on top of only a foot or so of seam. This seam headed back into the field for ……. about 6 feet. The rubbish had been tipped in a narrow band down the side of the old clay pit, and then capped within a very few years. The seam was good, being a fairly typical brick pit dump, all the ash removed for brick making and the leftover glass, metal and pottery tipped into the nearest hole. Once Darren arrived it didn’t take long to finish the trench.
Above: Darren in the test trench. Topsoil / capping is put on a tarp to one side, tip contents kept separate on the other side. What turf there was is cut and heaped up to go back on top later. Total haul for the days digging was a bit pathetic, comprising a few local beers and one 10oz codd from John Davies of Gainsboro, but the age was good and the seam was heaving with stuff.
Before leaving we decided to have a careful scout around the pond edges and the shallow water. Darren soon found a stoneware bottle base sticking out of the side. It turned out to be a John Davies GB, which was a great way to finish the day.
Darren with the Davies ginger beer bottle found sticking out of the bank. This turned out to be the first GB of many.
The next day was a Sunday. We put down a much wider hole next to the first one, and this showed that most of the dump was actually under water (luckily still shallow enough in this area for us to dig wearing wellies), but the haul was slightly better. The was a huge number of broken codds.
The find of the day was a salt glazed porter bottle. Darren threw it to me from the hole saying "Shame this one’s plain". However, a quick rinse in the pond to remove the layer of slimy clay revealed the single word CLEMESHA impressed up against the shoulder. A nice early Stephen Green-type porter or ale bottle, but neither of us had any idea what Clemesha meant. Was it a persons name, or the name of the bottle contents? We also got a couple more Gainsborough codds, an aqua burst lip lamp (‘The Lamp") and a small heap of local beers. One of the beers was an extremely rare acid etched green glass bottle from James Sanderson of Gainsborough. There was still no sign of ginger beer bottles in the seam, but it was still early days.
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Above: The keepers for the second day: Beers, beers, and more local beers. A couple of codds and the Clemesha bottle (standing) relieved the monotony, along with a very nice c. 1820s – 30s stoneware jar, probably made at the Codnor Park pottery in Derbyshire
Above: The ‘CLEMESHA’ bottle after cleaning. 19.1cm tall, and 440ml capacity. Research eventually revealed that John Clemesha was an Ale and Porter Merchant with an address on Quay Street in Hull, between 1847 and 1855. The bottle was already 50 years old when it went into the tip.
The next dig was when I spent a day there on my own the following Friday. As with the previous dig there were loads of beers, with just one or two more interesting items to keep me going. This dig produced two gingers (Bardill of Derby & Burton, and Aldam Marshall of Retford), and a heartbreaker in the form of a tiny blue print preserve jar, transferred on one side with the words ‘Jennings Patent Capsule Model Preserve Jar’, and on the back a coat of arms with the date 1862 (as well as a large chunk missing).
Above: The first ginger beer dug from the seam sees the light of day for the first time in approximately 105 years. This Aldam Marshall GB from Retford is a common bottle in north Nottinghamshire dumps from 1898 (when Marshall took over the business of Alfred Foster) until about 1915.
A GOOD DAY AT THE DUMP.
Our fourth day of digging on the site was the 1st of October, the day before the 2005 Autumn Extravaganza bottle show at Elsecar. Even so, a full day of digging was scheduled, with plans to dig a larger hole slightly further away from the trees. This was getting into a part of the tip that had been quite heavily dug by the illegal diggers a few years previously, and which was covered with small overgrown holes and spoil heaps. The dump here extended about 15 feet back from the pond, up the bank and a few feet into the field. We cleared the weeds away, laid the tarps, and got going.
Darren starts getting into the seam once the cap is removed. Straight away the broken codds start piling up:
Within half an hour and only a foot down we found a plastic coke bottle left by one of the earlier illegal diggers (I don’t know why I’m looking so cheerful about it though):
We dug the whole area down to the ponds edge, where the seam was between 1 and 2 feet into the water (by now we had resorted to waders). It wasn’t really water in the hole, more a kind of liquid mud with lumps floating about in it. Darren was getting into seam a little way up the bank, and I was pulling out broken beers and codds from the seam at the bottom of the slope and a couple of feet under water, when I felt something roll under my foot. “Typical” I thought, “whatever that is it’s probably been rolling around in the mud for half an hour”.
Reaching down into the soup expecting to find yet another necked codd I instantly realised I had a champagne shape GB in my hand. Without bringing it out of the water I said to Darren “I’ve got a GB here, and it’s champagne shape”.
As he watched I lifted it from the water, and ……… “It’s an Economic!!!”.
THE bottle we had really hoped to find on this site! Darren reckons, looking back, that his biggest concern was that if I didn’t stop walking backwards into the pond while staring open-mouthed at the bottle we would lose it (and possibly me) as soon as we had found it. Anyway, I recovered my senses and a quick rinse showed that we had turned up a VIRTUALLY PERFECT Economic Supply Company GB. The incredibly crisp transfer was the icing on the cake.
That’s me with a freshly dug Economic GB in my hands! A bit better than the bottle in the previous picture.
After a long break, mostly spent staring at the bottle that was now lying on the grass, occasionally making stupid noises like ‘Wow’ (us, not the bottle), we packed it away and got back to the hole. The Economic turned out to be more or less on it’s own down by the pond edge. We turned our attention to digging up the bank to the top. After an hour or so pulling out broken codd after broken codd Darren went for a quick cigarette and tea break. I was scratching away at the top of the bank where the seam almost ran out and was only a few inches thick, thinking “This would be a good time for another Eco to show its face” when, Gulp! there was the neck of another champagne shape GB sticking out of the side:
It was jammed behind half a brick and a load of broken crockery, so it took a little while, but when it finally came free (watch the video here) it turned out to be a different pictorial ginger beer bottle: an East Brothers, from Louth!
So, not a bad days digging, all in all. One Economic and one East Brothers. Great examples of the best two GBs from Lincolnshire, and they both turn up in the same hole on the same day. The legends were true! (Or were they?)
Above: Darren pays homage to The Bottle Gods.
Below: Some of the 80 broken codds found that day, along with one broken (hens-teeth rare) 6oz hamilton from W. Unsworth of Retford, two broken Gainsborough GBs, and the other two rather better GBs in good condition. Bottom left of the codds is a very rare Beavis Patent with the characteristic curved cross-pinch, from John Davies (necked, of course):
All the Economic and East Brothers bottles really needed was a rinse under the tap. The East Brothers, which now lives in my collection is, like the Economic, just about mint. It is the Buchan made version with the 1896 date (Stiff made versions, with slightly poorer quality transfers and a generally different ‘feel’ to them, are more common than the Buchan examples). The Eco is shared between us, and has spent most of the past year or two on Darren’s shelves.
After the excitement of the dig on the 1st October my main memory of the Elsecar
show on 2nd October is repeating to myself “I must not tell anyone
about it until the dump is finished”, along with discussions with
Darren of how we were going to cope with the flood of Economic Supply Co ginger
beers we were ‘obviously’ going to dig over the next few months.
Alas, it was not to be.
© J. M. Kemp & D. Gray.
Digging Brickyard Lane, Part 2
