‘GERMS OF EMPIRE’
2016
75 x 100 x 75 cms
Michael Lisle-Taylor
Discarded bones from salt beef & salt pork production at the Royal Navy's primary Victualling Yard Deptford London 1513-1961, recovered from River Thames & marked with warship names in Indian Ink on paraloid B72. composite armature, cord.
The retreating tideline up and down the generous foreshores of the River Thames, offers a tempting opportunity to descend from its preaching embankments and explore. With so many millions of people living at its fringes, exploration of this debatable land is rewarded with a wild assortment of fruits. The river’s unprejudiced currents have whisked away the lost and discarded for millennia. Each consecutive tide relocating its urban flotsam and jetsam here and there, a little or a longtime later. Along its course, the evolutionary roots to beach-combing are paraded before us. Estuarial wading birds picking about for winkles and welks line up as our progenitors and primordial shadows. The beasts of dog-walker furrow through the silt for sticks while mudlarks and fishermen rake the shingle for social history and ragworm. Where their predecessor found and hawked coal, wood and iron for family survival. Us 'Aquatic Apes’ have always scavenged the frontiers of a maritime world. Our innate inquisitiveness is the curiosity that propels us down the tideline. Led by anticipation of discovering and motivated by successive rewards and disappointments. There is a global consistency to the ‘treasures’ along our shores, now indicative of our species’ infestation of the biosphere. Icons such as plastic bottles, fishing nets, flip-flops and polystyrene burger boxes, consistently litter the terrestrial margins at the marine borders, in the remotest corners of our planet.
One bright Sunday morning I took my daughters on a trip to the Cutty Sark in Greenwich. We parked up and mudlarked from the Trafalgar Tavern, upstream along the foreshore to the old tea-clipper. As we climbed the steps near the great ship’s bespoke dry dock, the two girls proudly showed me their finds; several odd shaped black sticks, a syringe, some oyster shells and a lost Oystercard. I relieved them of the syringe and noticing skeletal joints on the sticks, offered them the benefit of my limited biological knowledge. “Those aren’t sticks girls, they’re bones!” They were beside themselves with excitement pleading, could they take them to school for ‘Show & Tell’. Several weeks later, I rediscovered these treasures, dried out and forgotten in their Lego box. Deep mahogany hues of an ancient patina had replaced the muted green black algae, which had fallen aways as a dusty residue in the bottom of the box. A complex vascular network of tiny fractures, mapped the calcite outer shell of each ‘stick’. Visible through cleaved ends, was a fragile matrix of marrow. So intrigued by this material, I returned to the river without the entourage.
The waterway processes all that is submerged with a pallet of abrasion, erosion, corrosion and dissolution. A testament to this process is the banquet of colours, textures and forms that line its shores; material discarded by the city, smoothed by friction and forested by algae and seaweeds. A close inspection of the tideline at Greenwich will reveal a subtle and disturbing composition. Amongst the rounded stones, bricks, broken glass, tyre strips and engine fragments are a colossal amount of bone matter. In no time at all I had collected a ‘bag for life’ full of bits of cranium, mandibles, teeth, humerus, sternum, ribs, ulna, carpals and phalanges. A further fifteen minutes later I had harvested another three bags from this pre-fossilised bone-bed. A dog walker shouted to me from the embankment. As I tapped the mud from a hollow thigh bone, he approached. Ribbing me about my Herculean task to rid the river of its slaughtered crop he followed by lecturing me passionately on the source of the remains. The crux of his tale being “They were from the Royal Navy’s former Victualling Yard at Deptford” as he put it “up-shore on t’other side of the Tea Clipper”. On hearing ‘Deptford’, my immediate thoughts turned to the Turner painting I had recently visited, in Trafalgar Square’s National Gallery. It was his 1838 end of epoch painting ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ portraying a veteran ship from Nelson’s final battle. The composition records the retired sailing ship being hauled up river by a steamer for breaking at Deptford. It was a painting that had been on my mind, since seeing press photographs of HMS Ark Royal in several stages of deconstruction on a beach in Turkey. I had served on this latter celebrated aircraft carrier during the break up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. And thought the images of Ark Royal arriving at the scrap yard echoed Turner’s composition. The context was certainly similar and had filled me with an empathetic sense of loss. The dog walker wasn't wrong! as I walked upstream and drew closer to Deptford’s old wharfs the bone concentration increased. Incredibly these were the skeletal remnants of the animals who's skin shod the feet, and who's meat once filled the stomach’s of the sailors and marines who manned the gun’s at Trafalgar. However I soon discovered these bones represented more than a chapter, they were the epic. The scale, importance and longevity of the operation at Deptford implied these skeletal remains were the spent fuel rods of the agency that manned the guns at all the Royal Navy’s battles. Through my own experience I needed no convincing of how important these pigs and cows were. Food is central to functionality, morale and effectiveness of any military force. It is ironic in this case that Nelson’s most notorious adversary Napoleon Bonaparte, articulates the great importance of these rations best, with the familiar adage ‘an army marches on its stomach’.
The dockyard at Deptford served the Royal Navy prior to its conception in Tudor times, throughout its maxim and well into its decline during 1960s. From my riverside position I recognised the Master Shipwright's House and suddenly registered its connection to the Dockyard. The house still sits in an outstanding state of dilapidated preserve, at the edge of an expansive wasteland. The building frequently acts as a film location, where I have worked many times. The former dockyard, now a vast empty hardstanding next door, always arouses curiosity within the crew. Simply for the oddity of being such prime river frontage, sitting idle in a city forested with cranes for developments. The story of these bones on the surface felt relatively straight forward. But quite overwhelming when considering the macro complexity of applying a narrative to any single fragment and their reach. Each bone is a relic of a real life story whose journey connects animals, people, communities and ships across time and space. Though the deciphering of each tale requires a geological imagination. The trajectory and global reach of each adventure would undoubtedly find support in recorded enterprise, itineraries, purchase orders, stock lists, operational accounts, diaries and policies. Beyond my initial aesthetic attraction to the bone patina, they now possessed such rich objective and symbolic significance, I felt compelled to investigate further. The Victualling Yard was the key supply depot to the Navy for most of its existence, certainly from its beginnings to the end of British de-colonialism after the Second World War. If lines could be drawn from the herd and farm of each bone’s birth in the British Isles. Through to the markets is was traded in. To the yard it was butchered and salted in. To the ships it supplied and finally the sailors it fed. The lines would explode into a complex vortex of branches that would encapsulate the globe, the entire life of the Royal Navy alongside the rise and fall of the largest empire in history. Each bone presents a forensic linear link to a network. Its cuts of meat connecting directly to a web of individual ships on route to discover new markets, islands continents, wage wars, patrol, protect, privateer, trade, suppress, colonise, and fly the flag. They directly feed into the individual lifeblood of sailor’s who have suffered and celebrated lives full of boredom, discoveries, disease, defeats, victories, miseries, injuries, escapades, derisions, joys and camaraderie across the planet. The bones themselves, dissected from home grown meat in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales driven to the capital, quartered, stripped of its meat and cast away for fish food. Since then they have inhabited London’s shoreline, for up to half a millennia. Centuries either side of Trafalgar, they have bore witness to the traffic of the capital’s primary artery. In constant flux, moving with the wax and the wane of a luna pull, switching their course four times daily. These discarded over looked fragments of the past resonate with a complex tapestry of time, place and people. They were of the body that maintained the Service, that for all of its history nurtured the soul of a maritime island nation. There was a germinating feel to these bones, even in their decrepit state, planted out of site, they survive as nuclei to a more significant and conspicuous organism. Their positioning and history woven into the detail of sailors, ships and sutured with threads of ‘Empire’. The circumstance of these bones was brought to life by a passage in a book I was re-reading at the time. A page about the Thames in Joesph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ brings to life these inanimate observers. It ends “ What Greatness had not floated on the ebb to that river into mystery of an unknown earth!… The dreams of men, the seed of common wealth, the germs of empires”
Royal ships were resupplied and repaired in the small fishing village of Deptford as far back as 1420, but it was Henry VIII who consolidated the operation as a Royal Dockyard in 1513. The Yard became the navy’s principle facility, maintaining the fleet for over 350 years. Initially it was simply a dry dock, ‘great storehouse’ and basin used for trailing the latest maritime technology. Its expansion was rapid, growing through the Tudor periods, 16th and 17th centuries before reaching its zenith in the 18th century. The yard built, refitted, re-built, kitted-out and supplied the ships that charted the unknown world. It supplied the vessels that policed, expanded and defended Britain’s global territories and interests. Celebrated sailors such as Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Cook, Bligh, Vancouver and Nelson all operated and campaigned from its wharfs. However by the end of the Napoleonic Wars the majority of His Majesties Ships had increased in such size, they had out grown the silting river. The dockyard was subsequently less accessible and so shipbuilding moved down stream, with the transition from wood to metal to Woolwich and Chatham. The Victualling Yard nonetheless remained in Deptford on account of its convenient proximity to the capital’s trade wharfs, clothing industries and food markets. The local breweries, slaughterhouses, bakeries and mills which had always provided beer, salted meat, and ship's biscuits, were very soon consolidated within facility walls. The yard soon manufactured, sourced, preserved, stored and supplied the food, drink, clothing equipment and furniture to the entire fleet and all its satellite victualling yards at Woolwich, Sheerness, Chatham, Gosport, Plymouth and to many outposts at the furthest reaches of the Empire. The facility specialised in preserving foodstuffs designed to last weeks, even months: ship's biscuit, salted beef, salted pork, pease, oatmeal, butter, cheese and beer. Deptford's buildings stored huge quantities of cocoa, pepper, mustard, tea, sugar, rice, raisins, pork, peas, wine, porter, chocolate, sugar, tobacco, jackets, shirts, trousers, stockings, boots and medical supplies. One of the spirit vaults alone held 32,000 gallons of rum. Fundamental to the manufacturing, storage and logistical support were cooperages, crate and tin making workshops, wharfs, roads, trains and cranes. The nature and scale of operations at Deptford with its vast quantities of stores and products lead to inferior production, preservation and pilfering. In turn the Admiralty evolved systems of administration to quality control and accounted for this merchandise, thus reducing occasions for mutiny, corruption and black-marketeering. At its maximum the site covered 35 acres of river-fronted land and continued its vital role up until its closure in 1961.
Today, Deptford has long since been decommission and is largely levelled, ready for development. However some of the victualling yard’s historic infrastructure did survive Blitz and demolition. Below the surface, subterranean foundations, mast-ponds, wharfs and slips can be found, catalogued in recent archaeological digs, listed and reburied for preservation. There is a Tudor store house lying protected underground, but deprived of its foundation stone, removed for display in University College London. The riverside rum stores remains intact, likewise the Grade II listed Olympia Warehouse which also stands in situ waiting re-development. The dockyard clock tower was removed to Woolwich for restoration and then incoherently transplanted in Thamesmead. Whilst 20,000 Tudor bricks were harvested from the ruins and grafted on to a crumbling Hampton Court Palace. Most strikingly in its randomness, is the Victualling yard’s main gate, abandoned in an overgrown concrete jungle, amidst the 1960’s high-rises. Like a splendid tumour of past glory, festering in the generic blandness of a decaying and regenerating urban cityscape. A colonnade of officer quarters, sit behind the gates, cast as a shadow of its past splendour. Cut in to the Portland stone entrance and alluding to the exiled portal’s profound and forgotten function, sit two crossed anchors capping demonic looking ox-skulls. However it is not the limestone relief but the bones that still litter the Thameside tideline that resonate Deptford’s history most vividly. Each fragment is rendered with a clear patination of time, polished by the sand, baked in the sun, frozen by the frost and pigmented with the ecology and chemistry of river flow. Micro-organisms phosphates, nitrates, carbons, silicons, fluorides and narcotics deepen the hues with saturation over time. The twice daily ten meter tide, enforcing a rhythmic passage up and down the river has bestow a veneer of abrasion and soft deconstruction across the bone surfaces, often bracketed and contrasted with more violent tells. The dissected end points issued by the butcher’s cleaver and tap tap parallel siting strikes. These skeletal remains are not passive witnesses to the aquatic traffic in and out of London, without their nutrition there would have been no capable agency to create the Capital. They are directly accountable for London’s cultural and political position in the world today. Far from a solitary scene they represent a full episode from start to finish, fuelling the creation of a Navy, that built a maritime superpower and nation that acquired a global empire, which declined through two catastrophic world wars into near total dissolution. Paid for by the taxes and toil of the population, these remnants of the provisions, fed to sailors and marines drawn from the inhabitants, who served and sacrificed themselves for the sake of its soul.
There is a certain mythology that in the sailing heyday of the Royal Navy, its crews were all press ganged, flogged and fuelled with weevil infested biscuits and rotten meat. Although many were flogged, press ganged and ate bad food, it is more, a common misconception than the rule. The navy presented an attractive life style choice for many young men, given average working conditions and pay ashore. Sailors required a good source of fuel in order to physically operate the ropes, winches, canons, store the ship and survive the arduous conditions of service. A good nutritious food supply kept the sailors fit, warm, strong, healthy and content. They would not have stood for substandard meals and there are several examples throughout Naval history where the crew mutineered for this exact reason. Over time the Admiralty created the Victualling Board which created systems of good and plentiful food provision for the seamen, issued with scrupulous fairness. The Administration of supplies to the Royal Ships or ‘victualling’ as it was known developed over the centuries to improve efficiency, quality, value for money and reduced corruption. The scale of rations from 1847 amounted to a calorie intake of 5000, by comparison a modern standard recommendation for an active man is 2500-3000. Items on the chart were known as ‘species’. Samuel Pepys had drawn up the previous scale of rations in 1677. Which entitled each man to, one pound biscuits, one gallon of beer per day, with a weekly ration including eight pounds of beef or four pounds of Beef and two of bacon or pork, plus two pounds of pease and an issue of dried fish, two ounces of butter and four ounces of cheese. Before refrigerating and canning technology became widely available, food in the nineteenth century and throughout the northern countries was preserved by salting, pickling or drying. Often ships supplemented their preserved stores with fresh and even exotic food stuffs when ever possible. Even with the cramped living conditions onboard, most ships carried a certain amount of livestock and chickens. An example is recorded in accounts of a 28 gun frigate carrying 100 pigs and 100 goats which might be considered a fairly typical cargo. A high percentage of the beef culled for provisions at Deptford Victualling Yard came from Cork the ‘slaughterhouse of Ireland’. But cattle from all over the British Isles made the long distances across straits, rivers, hills and valleys to reach London’s Autumn fairs. They were culled and packed at this time of year, when the cooler temperatures were more sympathetic to preservation. This also alleviated the trouble and expense of feeding cattle over winter when food was scarce. The meat was processed on a production line, ‘Rander’s' cut the meat into strips and ‘Messer’s’ cut these in to smaller pieces. Quality measures required the check weighing of every 28th piece of beef or 56th piece of pork. Fairness was also promoted by master butchers instructing the prime cuts to be made slightly smaller. The official drink of seamen was beer although a half-pint of spirit [ grog ] might be issue and was equal to a gallon of beer. Spirits were issues as a reward, in cold weather, for a courage booster or at the captains discretion. The Victualing Yard’s own brewery sat along side the meat processing lines and storehouses, feeding its waste brewed grains back in to the system to fatten the pigs before slaughter.
The sculpture ‘Germs of Empire’ 2016 takes the form of a globe perhaps seeded by Anson’s Portland stone globes that cap the West Gate of the Old Royal Naval College. The iconic gate posts support a terrestrial globe on the south and a celestial sphere on the north, each six foot in diameter and weighing nearly seven tons they celebrate Anson’s extraordinary global voyage. The sculpture is assembled in drystone wall fashion from hundreds of the bone fragments and hung from a protruding ox-knee joint. The sphere of remains is divided into 120 quadrangle segments along its key longitudes and latitudes. In a process more arbitrary than by design, each bone has been christened and marked in museum specimen fashion. With the name of one of more than 13,000 ships commissioned into the Royal Navy. However ship names were often reused in some cases in excess of thirty times across the centuries. By keeping a name the intense emotional legacy aroused and invested in a ship during its service could be retained by its sailors and patrons. An inherited name might preserve formulae of values, ethos and esprit de corp, as a family name might. It was an emotional perpetuation of memory, a device for the remembrance of human cost issued by past successes and failures. Ships are more than a vessel full of people, they are microcosms of their particular contemporary society. These warships were manned by people from across the classes and sometime genders, drawn voluntarily or through compulsion from subjects at home and abroad. The ships were funded from the toil of the nation, in taxes drawn from the population’s personal income. They were constructed with the technology of its day, in direct response to and as a consequence of society’s principle anxieties and insecurities. Through the expanded odds of multiple ships per name and meat from a single bone being split between many salted barrels after butchering. It is certainly more than possible that meat from a named bone would have reach the same named ship. How many sailors had been nourished by these animals? I created a catalogue of the ships named on each bone used in the sculpture. It is compelling to see with a glance at the dates, types, crew numbers, operations and fates of each ship, how many individual stories these bone fragments might tentatively have touch. Embellished by the origins and fates of each ship whether ordered, purchased, paid off, scrapped, cancelled, lost with all hands, burnt, modified, converted, rebuilt, broken up, foundered, swopped, transferred, captured, broken up, hulked or imagined… These bones are rendered with stories and impregnated with content; of turbulent histories in personal, national and international scales; fluctuating political climates, international relations, advances in technology spawning; arms races and alliances that effected the world, country, and individual. The central sculpture continues the dialogue and has itself expanded, spawning many other artworks, drawings, photographs, sculptures and future installations.