PREVIEW: BRITISH 17TH CENTURY TRADE TOKENS 26 APRIL

If London is the sum of its parts, then it includes the communities lost to the changing face of history, especially to the morphing banks of its central lifeline, the River Thames.

Traces of those ghost districts can be found in trade tokens, and one of these is a highlight of this sale: a galley farthing of Ratcliff Cross.

 

Once a hamlet known as Sailor Town, where ships docked at wharves at the closest navigable anchoring pint to the City of London, Ratcliff gained its name from the red gravel that emerged near Wapping Marsh and was long used as ships’ ballast.

From here, merchants despatched cargoes across the empire, bringing home exotic goods in exchange, and Ratcliff Cross served as a focal point for international trade for the best part of 350 years from the reign of Elizabeth I.

The victim of its own success, the community was swallowed up in the expansion of the city and docklands during the Industrial Revolution and rise of Empire to its zenith in the 19th century.

Its reputation as a dark and dangerous place top venture lived on in the pages of Dickens, DeQuincey and others, as the highly informative blog Spitalfields Life explains:

“At the centre of everything in Ratcliff is the promise of the river and the reality of the mud. In Charles Dickens’ ‘Our Mutual Friend’ the “harbour of everlasting mud” oozes into the streets.

“Turn of the century accounts describe children who ‘would stand on Ratcliffe Cross Stairs and gaze out upon the rushing tide and upon the ships that passed up and down. At low tide they ran out upon the mud, with bare feet, and picked up apronfuls of coal to bring home. Needs must that a child who lives within sight of ships should imagine strange things and get a sense of distance and mystery.’ Dickens’ Ratcliff is ‘a place of poverty and desperation, where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river.’ It is depicted as isolated and semi-derelict, with boatmen inhabiting disused mills beside the river and making a living fishing dead bodies from the Thames.”

These vivid descriptions may live on solely on the page, and there is little to hint at its past today around the streets off the Commercial Road and the Rotherhithe Tunnel, except for the stone slipway at Ratcliff Cross Stairs. However, another reminder of the capital’s rich history of merchant seamen and their home port is the trade tokens, such as the one offered here.

Extremely rare, the token carries a very finely detailed image of a galley to the obverse, inscribed Y and GALY, with Ratcliffe Cross and T.M.W. to the reverse.

Consigned from the James Lamb Collection of 17th Century Tokens of the London Borough of Stepney, the estimate is £400-600.