Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Archaeology Tuesdays – Clocking-in token

Published Tuesday 18 April 2023 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Sometimes an artefact can throw light on things we now take for granted. It’s a commonplace to say that we ‘clock in’ to work without really thinking about what the phrase means. This token, issued by the Coleman Foundry Equipment Company Limited in Letchworth during the 1930s, is a reminder of the physical act of ‘clocking in’.

As the factory system developed in England from the eighteenth century on, employers wanted to know exactly how many hours each worker had been on site so that they could calculate their wages accurately. This was especially important on production lines, where staff had to be in place on time. It also enabled employers to know about people absent from work.

In the earliest factories, a ‘time office’ was set up next to the gate. Workers would report there on arrival, and the timekeeper would write their name and the time into a ledger. The system works well if the workforce is small, but as factories grew to enormous sizes, with hundreds of workers, this register system became too slow.

The earliest solution to the problem was to have a numbered token for each employee. When

they arrived at work, they would take it from the board where it was kept and put it into a box. Most were pierced to hang on hooks, but some, like this one, were not. The timekeepers would lock the box or take it away to the office as soon as a shift started, so that latecomers would have to report directly to them. In this way, the wages department would know exactly how much to deduct from wages to reflect how late a worker may have been. In some factories, even being a minute late would result in losing half a day’s pay. Tokens left on the board obviously belonged to absentees; managers would sack those who were absent regularly.

To speed up the process further, Victorian inventors came up with several mechanical devices to record time keeping. In 1855, John Adams of Aldwincle (Northants) invented the first time check machine, although those patented and made by William Maberley Llewellin (1849-1930) in 1881 and Frank Brook (1853-1929?) in 1889 are better known. They were clockwork devices that contained a large drum divided into segments driven round by the clock. As each worker arrived, they would put their own token into the machine and it would drop down a chute into the drum segment currently underneath it. The timekeeper would remove the drum once everyone was due to be at their work, and record which workers were in each segment (often representing ten or fifteen minutes). They would then put the token back on the board where it was kept. Workers would repeat the process when they left for the day, ‘clocking off’. In some factories, each worker had two tokens of different metals (usually brass and copper), one for arrival at work and the other for departure.

William Llewellin was from Bristol and was born into a family with an established brass foundry, set up in 1832. He studied at university in Glasgow, where he received a Certificate in Engineering Science (1872). His first patent, in 1881, was for a modified version of John Adams’s original time check machine. He set up his own company, the Llewellin Machine Company, in 1883, with branches in Bristol and Glasgow. As well as making his own design of time check machine, the company also made clocks and other mechanical devices. He continued to develop his time recording machines, taking out new patents until the 1920s.

Frank Brook was born in Huddersfield, where he worked as a weaver. He also had a watch repair business. The mill manager began researching ways of recording workers’ attendance, which was a source of conflict between them and the timekeeper. Brook worked with a Swiss clockmaker, Ulrich Fischer, to develop a mechanical time recorder about 1888. Although the machine was a success, it was unpopular with Brook’s co-workers, so he left the factory to develop the machine further. He eventually patented his first device in 1893 and he formed the Brook Time Check Company in 1896, which began to manufacture it under the trade name Paragon. The company was not successful and went into liquidation in 1899. He continued developing his machines while selling those made by the American company Bundy as the British licensee for their products. In 1907, he partnered with J J Stockall to found another short-lived company, which collapsed in 1911. Success finally came with his partnership with Arthur Gledhill in 1912, and the Gledhill-Brook Time Recorder Company continued in business until 1964.

The Coleman Foundry Equipment Company Ltd was established in Letchworth Garden City about 1933, on the corner of Icknield Way and Norton Way North. It was perhaps a small operation, as most large factories had moved over to a card stamping timekeeping machine by this time. We know little about the company, which had moved to Stotfold by the end of the decade and continued in business there until 1959. During the Second World War, it provided materials to the Ministry of Supply and Aircraft Production.

Tokens like this one were already old-fashioned when the Coleman Foundry Equipment Company set up its factory in the Garden City. They had no financial value and as utilitarian (and unpopular) objects, they rarely survive. This one entered Letchworth Museum as a gift from J R Castledine, one of the founder members of the North Hertfordshire Archaeological Society. It is now on display in the Living in North Hertfordshire gallery of North Hertfordshire Museum.

This sort of object has broader implications for how we interpret the past. While they were familiar to a certain segment of the population – factory workers – they would not have been to other people. A London banker or a Hebridean crofter would have been mystified by such a token. What is an everyday item in certain situations is completely meaningless in others. These tokens have no ‘value’; nor does coinage, except as a symbol of financial worth.

Archaeologists have traditionally lumped all the contemporary artefacts found in a specific region together and used them to define ‘archaeological cultures’. Our experience of the contemporary world shows that this is too simple. Sometimes, archaeologists have looked at different sets of material culture in economic terms (following Marxian analysis) or ethnic terms. Even this oversimplifies reality. Human societies consist of overlapping subsets. For instance, élites are easily identified by their expensive jewellery and so on, early Christian communities had distinct metalwork, and the Roman military is instantly recognisable as different from other provincials.

We should think of these subsets as ‘subcultures’. The definition of subcultures is associated with the so-called ‘Birmingham School’ of sociology and particularly with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. The Centre emphasised the role of youth subcultures and became prominent during the second half of the 1960s. Stanley Cohen’s 1969 doctoral thesis on juvenile delinquency for the University of London proved seminal in setting the agenda for later studies. Most later researchers followed his focus on working- and lower middle-class male youth, particularly their participation in gang cultures. The media created and maintains this perspective.

However, the roots of subculture theory are in the Chicago School of sociology from the 1930s to 50s, which invented the term ‘subculture’. They regarded subcultures as deviant, an assumption full of unstated. By definition, the ‘mainstream’ cannot be ‘deviant’, so it has never been analysed in subcultural terms. However, it is entirely appropriate that this type of analysis be extended across all social groups, including the ‘mainstream’. The objection to calling subcultures ‘deviant’ is the implication is that there exists a ‘wider society’, as if there is a single behaviour pattern to which the majority of the population subscribes, even if it does not always conform.

This is a view that can be traced back to the early nineteenth century and for which there is no empirical support. Very few individuals fit the pattern of behaviours that are supposed to define ‘wider society’, either completely or in any but the most superficial ways. People within a society will follow most of its rules, but not all of them, and not all at the same time. So-called ‘wider society’ must be broken down into smaller subsets, all overlapping, but nevertheless distinctive. This fits the lived experience of individuals and the complexity of society as well as the patterning of archaeological data much better than normative models. It virtually compels the use of subcultural analyses of society.

What we are looking at with this token, then, is an example of an artefact associated with a specific subculture, that of the factory worker in the first half of the twentieth century. Even in such an unusual place as Letchworth Garden City, where urban design was supposed to break down the barriers of social class, different social groups – which we can regard as archaeological subcultures – used different forms of material culture. These differences range from everyday items such as clocking in tokens up to the design of homes.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Archaeology Tuesdays – The Mount, Sandon

Published Tuesday 11 April 2023 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

About 700 m east of the village of Sandon lies a tree-covered mound, off Park Lane and north of Notley Green. According to the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) in 1911, it is a ‘moated tumulus’. This is not a recognised term in archaeology and shows that the surveyor had difficulty recognising what it was. Indeed, there has long been speculation about its origins and purpose. It has been described as a prehistoric burial mound, an early medieval moot hill, a Norman motte, a medieval windmill mound or a combination of these.

It is almost circular, measuring about 26.2 m northwest to southeast, and 26.8 m northeast to southwest. The flat top of the mound measures 17.7 by 19.5 m and is raised a little over a metre above the surrounding ground level. A shallow ditch 4.3 m across surrounds the mound, with a gap of 4.9 m towards the northeast. Water collects in part of the ditch during wet weather. It was covered in trees by the time of the Tithe Award in May 1840; although trees are not shown here on Bryant’s map of 1822, he may have ignored small clumps in his survey.

The Mount lies in a field called Woodley Yards by 1910, although in 1840 it was called Knotley Field. A field east of it was known as Knotley Mill Field, to the south of which was Mill Field. Knotley is a variant of Notley, the name of the green south of the site, itself recorded as Knott Green in 1676. Mill Field is over a mile north of Mill End in the parish, so the names can hardly be connected.

The Hertfordshire folklorist William Blyth Gerish (1864-1921) recorded a gruesome story about The Mount. A house belonging to a wealthy man stood on the top of it and a local boy overheard some men plotting to burgle it. They spotted the boy, captured him, and threated to flay him (remove his skin) if he told anyone what he had overheard. The brave lad did tell the owners what he had heard, so they could defend their property. The attempted burglary was foiled, but the thieves caught the boy and carried out their threat. The boy survived the ordeal, saying that the most painful part of being flayed was having the skin removed from his fingertips and his toes. Letchworth Museum’s archives (now in North Hertfordshire Museum) have a typescript bearing the name of R J Kingsley of Nelson in New Zealand dated May 1904, which may be the source of Gerish’s published tale.

The East Hertfordshire Archaeological Society organised a trip to The Mount on 24 July 1929. The visit reignited interest in it. The headmaster of Sandon School, James W Sherlock (1898-?), suggested that it was a ‘Late Bronze, or Early Iron Age’ burial mound in 1932. He reported that the owner of the site, Joan Bowman of Sandon Bury, had given permission to excavate in the near future. As it is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, Percival Westell of Letchworth Museum got permission from the Ministry of Works to undertake investigations.

He organised a cross-shaped trench across the centre of the mound between April and September 1933. Local volunteers, including many residents of the village who had attended an adult education class run by Mr Sherlock, did the bulk of the work. Westell was rarely on site, and Mr Sherlock kept him informed of progress by letter. Around the time of the excavation, a schoolboy discovered a Romano-British melon bead from the field surface near The Mount, raising the possibility that it was of Roman date.

The excavators began by sinking a cross-shaped trench across the centre of The Mount, labelling each arm as a separate trench (1 to the north, 2 to the south, 3 to the east and 4 to the west). Each branch was three feet (0.9 m) wide and none went deeper than six feet six inches (2 m). Two extensions made later were labelled 5 and 6. At the centre of the mound, the deepest part, the top deposit was a layer of loamy topsoil, one foot (0.3 m) this. Beneath this was a layer of chalky clay two feet six inches (0.75 m) thick above a band of loamy clay-with-flints six inches (0.15 m) thick. The lowest two feet six inches (0.75 m) consisted of boulder clay containing glacial erratics. This was the underlying natural subsoil.

The first finds were made immediately beneath the topsoil, with those at the lower levels found in an area of 16 by 3 feet (4.9 by 0.9 m). The excavators found 757 potsherds, four small copper alloy objects, 200 iron nails, a knife blade, a key and other iron objects, animal bones (cattle and pig, including teeth) and oyster shells. On 27 April 1933, Mr Sherlock wrote to Westell mentioning the discovery of a coin. According to the Royston Crow of 21 April 1933, all the finds made by that time were made at depths of between six inches and five feet (0.15 to 1.5 m) but no deeper.

Six feet (1.8 m) down, the excavators discovered two wooden beams, arranged at right angles. They extended away from the sides of the trenches in which they were found (1 and 3) and numbered these extensions Trenches 5 and 6. The beams were made from oak, 16 feet (4.9 m) long and one foot (0.3 m) square and at each end, there were recesses to take angled uprights. The excavators correctly identified the beams as a cross-tree, the base elements of a wooden post mill, the earliest type of windmill. They lay at the bottom of a pit cut through the layers of the mound, apart from the topsoil, and into the underlying subsoil; it was the fill of this pit that contained all of the finds. The cross trees were no longer in their original positions, one lying on top of the other in such a way that they were disconnected at the mortices that originally held them together.

Although Percival Westell reported that all the finds went on loan to Letchworth Museum (accessioned as 1935.6922), there are only 13 potsherds in the collection. Perhaps the loaned material was returned (to Mr Sherlock or Mrs Bowman?) or it suffered from a ‘rationalisation’ of the archaeological collections in the early 1970s. However, the thinning out of archaeological material involved mainly disposing of unfeatured body sherds, yet only one of the ten handles, none of the twenty-five base sherds and none of the thirty-six glazed or decorated sherds remains in the collection.

However, Gerald Dunning of the British Museum examined the entire collection of pottery in the 1930s, after visiting the site. He identified about 75% of the material as being of thirteenth-century date, with some extending into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a few residual Romano-British sherds. He reported that the most common form was cooking pots, followed by bowls and jugs. In a letter to Westell dated 30 May 1933, he stated that ‘I see no reason for dating the mound earlier than 13th or even 14th century’.

Controversy arose from the identification of three potsherds from low down in the trenches. Fortunately, they survive in the museum’s collection. Gerald Dunning concluded that they were from a single vessel, which he dated to the seventh to ninth centuries. Westell seems not to have been satisfied with Dunning’s dating and he approached O G S Crawford, M O’Reilly, L A Curtis Edwards and Sir Cyril Fox for further opinions. Their estimates of the date of the pottery ranged from Pre-Roman Iron Age to High Medieval. Puzzled, but realising that the date of these sherds might throw some light on the date of the mound, Westell left a note with the sherds: ‘Please keep these 3 sherds separate & kindly date if possible. ?Iron Age or Romano-British? Found 6 ft down in Sandon Mount resting on undisturbed, original ground level. ?Urn containing cremated interment. ?Do these a/c for origination of the Mount? ?Tumulus.’.

Dunning’s published description of the sherds was wrong in several ways. Although he was correct to say that the outer surface of the sherds is black, the ware itself is a reddish-brown and the surface has been blackened by smoke action, suggesting that they are from a cooking vessel. His dating is also wrong. These sherds are identical to the Museum Service’s reference sherds of St Neots-type Ware, a fairly rough fabric tempered with fossiliferous shell and a slightly soapy feel to the surfaces. This ware was produced in the south and east Midlands, centring on the towns of Cambridge, St Neots, Bedford, Northampton and Oxford. Several kiln sites exist, including St Neots and Olney Hide. The date is firmly Saxo-Norman (AD 850-1200).

Westell also changed the stratigraphic position of the sherds between the original draft of the text and the publication. In the published version, Dunning states unequivocally that they came from ‘the old ground level below the mound’, presumably because this is what Westell had told him. However, the typescript contains the crossed-out phrase ‘found close to, if not upon, the original ground level’, suggesting that while they were indeed found at a considerable depth, they were nevertheless contained in the mound material.

The excavators found a coin towards the northern end of Trench 1, at a depth of three feet (0.9 m). Mr Sherlock sent it by post to Letchworth Museum on 27 April 1933. He described how it had been ‘encased in clay’ and ‘covered in a greenish deposit’. However, we do not know what the coin was as it is not mentioned in Westell’s report. There is a medieval coin from Sandon, donated by a Miss Field, which is an issue of Edward IV, dated 1464×70 and minted in London. Although it is possible that this is the one from The Mount, Miss Field’s two other donations of coins (a Roman coin of Antoninus Pius and a late medieval jeton) both came from Roe Green.

The excavation at the Mount shows that it was undoubtedly the site of a sunken post mill, the pottery suggesting that it was raised in the thirteenth century. Although Westell was determined to demonstrate that the mound pre-dated the mill, there is little reason to believe this to be the case. The pit dug through the mound down to the level of the cross-trees could have been dug after the mound to insert them or, perhaps more likely, to remove timbers at the time of its demolition. If the latter, the ceramic finds suggest that it happened in the fifteenth century at the earliest.

Westell angered Ruth Pym of The Settlement, who read his account of the excavation in The Times. In a letter of 12 November 1933, she said ‘I have seen the Times article & find it almost unconceivable that you should have let the Settlement down so completely – the “elder scholars” were in the Settlement Class, which gave you the opportunity of making the whole excavation – that is where you should have paid your debt to us & given us our due place – no wonder you did not show me the draft report.’ He was evidently taken aback by this and the published version of the report acknowledges ‘Miss Ruth Pym and members of Sandon Adult Educational Settlement Class’.

Westell did his best to create an air of mystery about The Mount by creating a ’manufactroversy’ around the three sherds found low down in the excavation. Having received an answer from Gerald Dunning that he did not like – that they were medieval – he sought the opinions of other experts and we no doubt he was delighted that they did not agree. It is fortunate that they remain in the museum collection, it is clear that they are contemporary with the other pottery found, albeit at the early end of the range.

Westell also tried to establish the mill on the mound as one of the earliest in England, if not the earliest. The earliest documented mill in England is from 1185 at the ‘lost’ village of Weedley in Yorkshire, but they were known in the Arab world before AD 800. The earliest types in this country are the post mill, as at Sandon, in which the entire body of the mill pivoted around a central post to allow the miller to catch the best wind direction. There is a documentary record of a mill in Sandon as early as 1222, on land belonging to the manor of Gannock. Whether this is the windmill at The Mount (which is close to Gannock Green) or the lost mill that gave its name to Mill End is uncertain. The mill at The Mount was probably known as Knotley Mill, to judge from the nearby field names.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

A German Airman’s Memoirs By Hubert Faber – one of the Heinkel III crew who landed at Whitehall on 8th April 1941.

Published Thursday 6 April 2023 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

I have received your letter for which many thanks. Thank you also for the description and friendly greetings. It is very interesting after 30 odd years to reconstruct the events of that night and I am certainly ready and willing to make any contribution I can towards assembling the book – which would be nice to accomplish.

We flew a Heinkel III, the crew consisted of the following:

Pilot Lt. Julius Tengler

Observer Gefr. Wolfgang Earle

Wireless Operator V.O. Hubert Faber

Flight Mechanic Gefr. Franz Reitmayr

One other airman flew with us that night V.O Zander. So far as I can remember I was the last to leave the aircraft. As I came down through the air suspended below my parachute, I saw the open parachutes of my comrades and the crashing, burning aircraft under me. I landed on a pasture or field. My parachute was caught in the branches of a small tree or bush and I remained hanging. I had been wounded in the left leg by a phosphorus bullet – incendiary bullet, and I was also lightly wounded in the hands. I was able to free myself and I hobbled to where I thought my comrades would be. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anyone. I decided to return to where I had left my parachute. On the way there by a hedge I was taken prisoner by Home Guards – they were armed civilians. They took me to a nearby village. In the village there were many people on the roads. I was put into a car the guards did not put their weapons into the car; they opened the side windows and pointed their guns through from the running board. So we journeyed through the darkness of the night. When I got out I was handed over to soldiers. One of these was a Pole He had a great hatred against the Germans and he expressed this. I was taken into a room – there were two of my comrades there already. One was Lt. Tengler who had internal wounds. He lay rolling about on the ground. It seems that he had knocked himself against the aircraft tail as he bailed out. The other was Franz Reitmayr. He had a wounded left arm and had lost a lot of blood and was very weak. I could not grasp why all the people in the room were so mad to get hold of souvenirs; as I took of my flying suit they came at me from all sides with scissors and so on to cut off my shoulder epaulettes, collar tabs and all my other badges markings and orders and took them all off. After that and only then were our wounds provided for and we were taken to an ambulance and on to a hospital. There I lay a long time with Reitmayr in the same room. Afterwards we received medical attention and were taken to separate rooms. As I asked after my comrades it was said to me that they are here no more but have been taken to a special hospital. Whilst I was there I had many visits from an interrogation officer, an Austrian. As there were things he wanted to know, I received only short replies to my personal private questions.

My unit was the 3^rd group of Kamp;geschwaden 26 – the Lion Geschwaden. It was a special group with special orders. It flew on a directional beam whereby we were also guided from home over the target and received a signal to drop the bombs.

The security re the aiming points regarding this system was very great. We flew in advance of other units (pathfinders).

Our bomb bays were loaded with incendiary bombs to mark the target, usually with one heavy bomb as well so that the following aircraft knew when and where to drop their bombs. Over this system the officer interrogating asked various questions of me. My seemingly plausible statements did not seem to satisfy him. One day he was with me he said the doctor would be coming soon and would be coming to see my wounds and it would not hurt as I would get an injection. Afterwards when I became fully awake and established my whereabouts I realised that I was still wearing the old bandage – it had not been changed. I did not see the interrogating officer again. During my residence in the hospital I was also visited by the R.A.F. Fighter pilot who had knocked me down. As my wounds started to heal and I was capable of being transported so I was taken to the military hospital at Knutsford near Manchester. I was astonished when I met Franz Reitmayr there. We travelled by train together to Manchester. From a platform in Manchester we were taken in an ambulance to the military hospital. The reception in Manchester railway station and the journey through the town was very unnerving. The night before there had been an air attack on Manchester and the civilian population were still very shocked as, of course, I can well understand. Today I am only too thankful that there was with us a body of uniformed troops to protect us. Behind the cordon the civilians threatened us – calls like ‘kill him’ were shouted at us. In the military hospital we were again with German P.O.W.s – brought together. There came new wounded prisoners of the Air Force and of the Navy – some from the Bismarck and they brought us the latest national news with them. Reitmayr went from here to an exchange camp and was later repatriated on an exchange basis. I came after my convalescence to the P.O.W. camp at Bury. It was a former old textile factory and here we began to get the feeling that we were P.O.W.s. The food was not very good, something we could understand, the English civilians had the same. The guards were variable – the Scots have their special peculiarities. I know not whether they valued such or lay any value on such individuality but I will therefore in catch words drive away (Can’t get that bit!). On 22.12.41 I was with the greater part of the camp and transferred to Canada. The journey by train, the ship a freighter the journey across the water in a convoy and again a railway journey to another camp was very interesting, it was a small new camp which we ourselves beautified – it contained 800 prisoners. The difficulties were made lighter not least of all through the help of the Y.M.C.A. I willingly went to work in E…….as a lumberjack – it made a pleasant change. After residence in the woods as a lumberjack I was taken to another camp at Medicine Hat and Lethbridge – these were in the province of Alberta. Each camp numbered about 10,000. I can only say looking back that in Canada we had a good time to the end of the war. In 1946 we were transported to England. There, there were two possibilities, we could go to work in a work camp or we could go to a camp in Scotland. I declared myself ready to work and was sent to Wales. From the camp we were sent to farms. I worked in the area of Tenby, Pembroke and Carmarthen. At the end of 1946 I was prepared for my release and in December 1946 I commenced my journey home from Hull. In Germany I was in 3 camps but with patience at last, on 5.1.1947 I was released from imprisonment.

It was not easy for me – I had been imprisoned for six years – to find myself a free man without a home in a destroyed Germany.