Archive

Back when the Methodists were in charge of Wilton’s, rumour had it that in its alluringly raffish music hall days there was a secret cellar that drunken sailors were cast into – after they’d been robbed blind, of course.

But the two big excavations at Wilton’s (as part of restoration works) in 1980 and 2012, didn’t turn up any skeletons, or even secret passages leading to the river. Instead they revealed countless objects that testify to Wilton’s varied past. Some of them are what you’d expect from a building with such a richly layered: bits of masonry, examples of decorative plasterwork, scraps of wallpaper.  But there are other objects that give you a vivid insight into the lives of the people who, over the decades, worked at Wilton’s or came there for entertainment, whether secular or spiritual.

And I have been the lucky person whose task it was to rummage around in the archive boxes (well, to comb through the database, actually) and assemble a collection of items for display in the John Wilton room. These ‘unconsidered trifles, some of which will literally have fallen through the cracks, allow us to connect in a very direct way with the people who have used the building.

Probably the earliest finds are the hundreds of pieces of clay pipes, which also be found on the shore of the Thames. Commonplace they might be, but if you look closely you can see that there are subtle differences in design – some extra moulding round the bowl, some bevelling. Later smokers have switched to cigarettes: the familiar Player’s brand, but also Turf brand, now long gone.

There is plenty of evidence of drinking of all sorts, from a small stoneware beer (?) flagon, to the elegant green glass of an Idris lemonade bottle (by appointment to the Royal Family), to fragments of patterned china, including willow pattern. (The Methodists were big on teas.)

A whiff of the glamour of Wilton’s still hangs around the Parisian perfume bottle discovered under the stage (could it have belonged to the remarkable Madame Senyah herself?), and one small medicine bottle with a cork retains traces of a mysterious substance . . .

Children were well catered for at Wilton’s, as the Methodists were all for ‘early conversion’, but they were clearly had a lot of fun: here are marbles, a toy car and half a toy soldier, a magic lantern slide, and a ticket for a bus outing.

With some of the objects, it’s much harder to guess how they would have been used. The two tiny glass inkwells, for example, in in the shape of a church and one in the shape of a house: were they part of the office equipment of a Victorian Methodist clerk, or perhaps used for giving disadvantaged children some extra writing practice?

The quote has it that ‘the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’, but on the evidence that has come to light from the foundations of Wilton’s, people liked to eat, drink and have fun in the company of their fellows, much as we do now.