More on late Glacial hunter gatherers

Poulton le Fylde elk and barbed point

Recently I wrote about a controversy  over some barbed bone points or harpoons from Holderness in East Yorkshire that took place during the 1920s. Another discovery that sheds some light by association on the Holderness points is that of Poulton-le-Fylde. During the construction of a bungelow animal bones were discovered together with a couple of bone points. The animal had suffered a number of wounds at the hands of prehistoric hunter gatherers. One of the points had even pierced its hoof. Presumably the animal tried to escape the hunters by swimming but, weakened by its wounds, it drowned and the carcass was never recovered. Thousands of years later the animal’s skeleton was discovered during building work. The Poulton-le-Fylde elk can be seen in the Harris Museum in Preston and a truly magnificent exhibit it is too!

The results from the radiocarbon-dating showed the elk died some 13,500 years earlier. This would put it in the late Glacial. Between about 23,000 and 19,000 years ago a large ice sheet covered much of northern Britain. As Ice Age drew to a close the climate got warmer and the ice sheets retreated but this improvement was not sustained and there was a sharp cold ‘snap’ about 13,000 years ago that lasted about 500 years before the climate improved again and warm conditions prevailed similar to those we enjoy today. The elk in the UK dispappeared  because of pressure of hunting, or climate change or a combination of both factors.

The Poulton-le-Fylde elk provides an example of an animal hunted using very similar bone points to those found by the Morfitt family. The association of points with a large mammal skeleton can be compared with the point from Skipsea Withow. The date at which this happened is also of interest. The contested Holderness harpoons have never been dated. Having been boiled in glue by the early 20th century antiquaries in order to conserve them means they cannot now be accurately dated. However, a barbed point discovered in a quarry at Gransmoor in Holderness during the 1990s was dated to about 13000 BP, again comparable to the Poulton-le-Fylde example.

What we seem to have is evidence across northern Britain of hunting at an early date, after the melting of the ice sheets. Waterlogged landscapes like Holderness and the Fylde  enabled the survival of large mammal skeletons intact and the barbed points of spears associated with them. the Morfitts’ points may be even older than they were said to be during the 1920s.

Genuine after all?

Letters to the press

In previous emails I’ve explored the controversy over two bone points found in Holderness in East Yorkshire in northern England during the early 1920s.  The Curator of Hull Museums, Thomas Sheppard, accused the people who found the objects of being charlatans. As we have seen this was the not the first time that the Hull Curator had come across the Morfitt family. In the early 1900s he had been a regular visitor to their cottage at Atwick in Holderness. Sheppard and Mr William Morfitt had a serious falling-out at the end of 1903 and afterwards Sheppard criticised the family relentlessly. In 1922 A.Leslie Armstrong published two bone points from the Morfitt collection and argued they were Maglemosian or Mesolithic. Sheppard implied they were forgeries. Two committees of enquiry met to decide whether they were authentic but the finds were so ambiguous both Sheppard and the Morfitt family claimed victory.

One of the committees noted in its report that the evidence on which Thomas Sheppard’s  judgement was based ‘was no longer verifiable’. This was rather mysterious and it would be some eight years before the truth emerged. The comment was picked up by Armstrong who responded: ‘Mr Sheppard’s charge of forgery is based upon certain evidence said to have been given him by a person now dead – therefore unverifiable’. (1923). Who was this dead person and what had they said? It was only after the last member of the Morfitt family had died that Sheppard revealed ‘The Maglemose harpoons were made by Mr B. Morfitt in the presence of his sister who was spending a weekend with Mrs Sheppard and I and told us how it was done’.

Charlotte Morfitt

The sister was Charlotte Morfitt who died in 1914. Sheppard claimed to have held back this information out of sensitivity to old William Morfitt’s feelings. William died in 1923, Beaumont died in 1929 and Sheppard revealed the source of his information – and why he was so certain that the Maglemosian points were forgeries – in 1930. Perhaps surprisingly Sheppard tried to acquire the Morfitt collection for Hull Museums when the future of the collection was under discussion. However, Hornsea District Council planned to put the collection on show though nothing ultimately came of this proposal and in the end the collection was transferred to the Yorkshire Museum, where it still is.

When the bone points were bequeathed to the British Museum after William Morfitt’s death, Thomas Sheppard obtained casts and put them on display in Hull Museum’s ‘fakes and forgeries’ cabinet. It looked as though Sheppard had had the last word. Or had he?

Another barbed point was found amongst ‘moor log’ dredged from the bed of the North Sea on the Leman and Ower banks off Lowestoft in 1931. In 1932 a bone point was found on Hornsea foreshore but it was not published until after the Second World War.  Sheppard retired in 1941 and died in 1945. No less than thirteen – thirteen! – were found in the vicinity of Brandesburton, not far from Hornsea, during gravel extraction. Some of the latter were reported by J.B.Fay, Assistant Director of Hull Museums, who, like Sheppard, spent most of his life working for the institution. In 1956 Clark and Godwin wrote ‘In view of an old controversy it may be added that close examination of the Skipsea and Hornsea specimens alongside those from Brandesburton can leave no further doubt as to the genuineness of the earlier finds.’

If the bone points were authentic what are we to make of Sheppard’s accusations and his motivation? Sheppard made much of the fact that the circumstances of discovery of one of the points seemed non-sensical. It’s in the entertaining poem quoted in an earlier blog:

‘Til Mr Morfitt passed one day,
With iron rod to find his way.
And fourteen feet it penetrated
And then it stopped; or so ’twas stated.

Aaron and Beaumont Morfitt. Beaumont is standing on the right. Is he holding the iron rod he used in prospecting?

How could Beaumont (the Mr Morfitt in question) have inserted an iron rod into peat deposits and then dug down to recover the object he had detected by probing? It doesn’t add up, does it? It doesn’t if Beaumont was standing  on the ground surface and digging down. But what if was standing at the base of a cliff that had been eroded by the sea? Beaumont could be fourteen or more feet below the ground surface as measured from the top of the cliff, but still be standing on the foreshore and probing the deposits horizontally. See photo below. The object Beaumont found would be a depth of fourteen feet relative to the top of the cliff  without Beaumont having to dig down to reach it.

Skipsea Withow

And what of Sheppard’s statement that no peat had been found at Hornsea (in which the Hornsea example was said to have been found)? In August 1902 the Hull Scientific and Field Naturalists Club visited Hornsea to see a section exposed during the erection of a new gasometer. Beds of gravel, shell marl and peat (my italics) were observed, recorded and published in the Naturalist (1902, p.366) by none other than Thomas Sheppard!

The main point of evidence – that Charlotte Morfitt told the Sheppards that her brother had made the bone points as a joke at the expense of their father could not be verified because Miss Morfitt had passed away in 1912. Elijah Howarth of Sheffield Museum said that ‘Beaumont was always fond of a joke, and had a very entertaining fashion of humour but there was no shadow of deceit about him’. There were some curious lengths of bone with crudely-forked ends and an incised groove apparently for winding string in the Morfitt collection. They are illustrated in Hull News (1/2/1902). William Greenwell refers to them in his letters to William Morfitt though he did not know what they were. Is it possible Charlotte saw her brother making them and told the Sheppards and that these fabrications became confused with the bone points that were genuine? If on all other grounds the Holderness points or harpoons are to be considered authentic, might this confusion or misunderstanding explain the controversy? Or was there a darker motive?

Sheppard’s bruising encounter with William Morfitt in 1903 changed the nature of their relationship. Having been humiliated in this way, did Sheppard allow his personal feelings to colour his judgement? No matter what the Morfitt family found, I suspect that Thomas Sheppard would have found some way to cast doubt on it or belittle it. The Morfitt family was eventually vindicated but archaeologically the controversy may have been more damaging. The mesolithic site at Star Carr is rightly famous for the preservation of a range of organic and other evidence, including the oldest dwelling. Had the discoveries along the Holderness coast at Skipsea and Hornsea been taken seriously, is it possible that this kind of evidence might have been found many years earlier? Might we be talking about Skipsea as the type site for mesolithic archaeology? We’ll never know of  course because sadly the sea has long since washed the deposits where the bone points were found away.

The Curator Strikes Back

This Blog continues the series about the relationship between Thomas Sheppard, Curator of Hull Museums and the Morfitt family of Atwick in Holderness. In the last instalment Leslie Armstrong claimed two bone points or harpoons in the Morfitt collection were Maglemosian or mesolithic, i.e. about 10,000 years old. Thomas Sheppard insinuated that the bone points were forgeries. A committee of enquiry was called to investigate the matter…

Casts of the Holderness harpoons in Hull Museums (the originals are in the British Museum)

A fortnight after the  British Association meeting in Hull Mr M.C.Burkitt, Prof.J.E.Marr and Dr A.C.Haddon met in Cambridge to compare the Holderness barbed points ‘harpoons’ found by the Morfitt family with similar specimens from Kunda in Estonia. The ‘Cambridge committee’ as it came to be known concluded that ‘in type, general facies, colour, and in the partially mineralised condition of the bone, the Holderness harpoons were identical with those from Kunda… both the Holderness harpoons are genuine antiquities’. However, another committee consisting of Sir Hercules Read, Prof A.Smith Woodward and Prof. P.F.Kendall was appointed by the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute to investigate the matter in London on 6th December 1922. Its conclusion was curiously ambiguous:

‘In general we see no evidence in the objects themselves that is conclusively against their genuineness… A curious feature is that the workmanship of the barbs is so similar as to point to their being the work of the same individual’.

This enabled both parties to claim victory. Leslie Armstrong and other supporters of the Morfitt family felt vindicated because the committee had said there was nothing against them being genuine but Shepaprd seized on the same committee’s comment that they seemed to have been made by the same individual. Admittedly there was a lot of  confusion over the context or layers in which the points were found. The Skipsea point was said to have been found ‘in silt beneath 5 feet of peat.’ When Beaumont Morfitt was called to the podium at the British Association Meeting in Hull in the autumn of 1922 he said “the points were 12 or 14 feet down and resting on boulder clay”. Sheppard argued that no-one could dig that deep on the Holderness coast and beds of peat of that depth had never been found. And if they were indeed made by the same individual it didn’t make sense. If they were found in different contexts deposited with an interval of hundreds, if not thousands of years, in between them, then that person must have lived an awful long time!

Thomas Sheappard

The Morfitt family had kept details of the discovery of the bone points in note books but the books were not produced in evidence before the committees, very likely because the entries would not have reflected well on the Morfitts, who made spelling mistakes and often wrote in what can only be described as ‘stream of consciousness’ style. The Hornsea point was said to have been found ‘on the margin of the mere whilst excavating for a new gasometer at Hornsea at a depth of 16 feet below the surface in a lacustrine bed amongst the roots of sedges and reedso. The discovery is dated 1915. A sub-committee satisfied itself that no such bed of peat deposits existed at Hornsea.

In publications the dates of discovery of both the Hornsea and the Skipsea points shifted in a way that suggested to Sheppard at least that the claims were mischievous. The Hornsea bone point is also recorded as having been found in 1905; the Skipsea example in 1902 . As there is a letter from Canon William Greenwell to Mr Morfitt dated 27th January 1902, I think the date of 1902 for Skipsea is reliable even if other dates were later published for its discovery. It seems this confusion may have been more down to human error and shoddy note-keeping by the Morfitt family rather than conspiracy. Even if one committee had ruled in favour of their genuineness, the second had raised doubts which Thomas Sheppard exploited ruthlessly. Ultimately it all looked rather damning for Armstrong and the Morfitts.

The London committee had also concluded ‘Mr Sheppard appears to have had strong grounds for doubting the authenticity of the harpoons, but the evidence on which his judgement is based is  no longer verifiable.’

Aaron and Beaumont Morfitt with one of their prized discoveries (Beaumont is on the right)

No what on earth did that mean? To answer that question we really have to fast forward to 1929 after the last member of the Morfitt family, Beaumont, had died. Thomas Sheppard finally revealed the strong grounds for doubting the authentity of the ‘Holderness harpoons’. But that’s the subject of the next blog in this series…

The Revenge of the Curator?

Thomas Sheppard, Curator of Hull Museums

Over the last  few weeks I’ve posted a number of blogs about the campaign waged by Thomas Sheppard, Curator of Hull Museums, against the Morfitt family of Atwick in East Yorkshire. Although Sheppard was initially a friend of the family, in 1903 something changed. I believe that the rivalry over collecting objects for their respective collections was so strong that William Morfitt and Thomas Sheppard had a violent falling-out, which seems to have had rather painful consequences for the Hull curator! Whatever happened Sheppard never forgot it. It is striking that after 1903 the Morfitt family, if it is mentioned at all, is often referred to in an oblique or coded fashion. In this way Sheppard disguised what were snide and dismissive remarks. In 1922, however, Sheppard had his best opportunity yet to belittle the family way, as we will see….

Albert Leslie Armstrong who championed two of the discoveries in the Morfitt collection

In the autumn of 1922 the British Association of Science held its annual meeting in Hull. One of the speakers was Albert Leslie Armstrong, the enthusiast who had continued Prof.William Boyd Dawkins’ work at Creswell Crags and so someone who is well-known in Manchester and elsewhere. Armstrong gave a paper about two serrated bone points that he had seen in the Morfitt family’s collection. Armstrong knew of, or had seen, very similar points from sites in Denmark that had been dated to the Mesolithic period about 10,000 years ago. The Danish examples had been found at a place called Maglemose or ‘Big Bog’ and Armstrong referred to them as Maglemosian. Armstrong argued that the serrated bone points found by the Morfitt family in Holderness in East Yorkshire were so similar that they must be of the same date. If so they were some of the oldest archaeological discoveries from northern Britain! It was quite a coup, or would have been, had Thomas Sheppard not spoken out against them, saying that the discoveries were not as old as the speaker…

Casts of the Holderness harpoons in the Hull Museums collection

In the reporting of the conference in the local newspapers this satirical poem appeared:-

Long years ago – so long – none knows,
There came a man from Maglemose,
(How he got here without clothes,
From Maglemose to Holdernose,
Without the frost bite in his toes,
Is more than we can dare suppose).

This man a long bone harpoon throws,
Just like those found at Maglemose.
He aimed it an elk (or deer),
The harpoon pierced him like a spear;
It no doubt killed that elk (or deer)
In what was once called Skipsea Mere

From long ago, in silt (or clay),
The harpoon and the elk did stay,
Till Mr Morfitt passed one day,
With iron rod to find his way.
For fourteen feet it penetrated,
And then it stopped, or so ‘twas stated.

The rod touched something firm and bony
(So different from an object stoney).
Then Mr Morfitt dug deep down,
For fourteen feet and got renown,
By finding something quite unknown,
(Except for one in Hornsea town).

How he dug, well, no-one knows,
But he found trace of Maglemose.
He got it in his small museum,
Where “with the other” all could see ‘em.
They rested there for years and years,
Until the British Ass. Appears.

Came an Armstrong long and weary,
With a most enthralling theory;
About the man from Maglemose
(In the Baltic, that, one knows)
Came to Atwick, or quite close,
While in search of food and clothes.

When a Sheppard roared like thunder,
“There has been a fearful blunder,
The harpoon from Maglemose,
Is not as old as you’d suppose”;
And in a manner most indecent,
Said the harpoon was quite recent!

Letters to the press

This is great fun and whatever one says about Sheppard no-one can deny he had a great sense of humour!  Though I’m not sure he wrote the poem. As a result of the controversy arising out of this very public challenge to the integrity of the Morfitt family, many letters appeared in the local press and two committees of enquiry met to decide whether the ‘Holderness harpoons’, as they became known, were authentic.

To find out what the committees of enquiry said visit this Blog next week!

More on Feuding Museum Curators

Sketch of William Morfitt

In a recent blog I explored the background to the animosity shown towards the Morfitt family of Atwick by Curator of Hull Museums, Thomas Sheppard. The origin of this feud seems to have been a quarrel over objects for the collections of Hull Museums and the so-called ‘East Coast Museum of Antiquities’ at Atwick in Holderness in East Yorkshire. After 1903 Sheppard does not have a good word to say about the Morfitt family and the Atwick collection, despite the fact that previously he’d praised the sons of William Morfitt, Aaron and Beaumont, for rescuing and piecing together a red dear skeleton found on the Holderness coast in East Yorkshire. I used the example of the press coverage of an Iron Age gold coin to show how Sheppard denied the Morfitt fmaily and their collection the ‘oxygen of publicity’. Comments made about the coin in the Hull Museum collection seem to reflect on a coin found by William Morfitt, although the latter was not named.

That example may be more or less convincing but there is another archaeological discovery that may shed light on the relationship between Sheppard and Morfitt. In 1913 builders working on the site of the intended Hornsea ‘Hydro’ or Turkish baths came across skeletons and associated grave goods. The Morfitt family who lived a few miles north of Hornsea at Atwick heard about the discoveries and a short article appeared in a regional newspaper. We know that the family recovered brooches and other finds because our old friend Canon William Greenwell wrote to William Morfitt on 4th April 1913:

‘The brooches are Anglian (Saxon) and there is no doubt they came from a cemetery… It is a great pity that the burials which have already been found should have been so carelessly treated [by the workmen on site]. There are no doubt many other graves on the site, but I fear it is too much to expect that any proper examination will take place. It is most regrettable that you are now unable to make an examination yourself…’

The material collected by the Morfitt family from Hornsea Hydro is now in the Yorkshire Museum, which acquired the Morfitt Collection many years after the events in question.

Anglian brooches found by the Morfitt family at Hornsea Hydro (Yorkshire Museum)

The objects include Anglian bronze brooches dating from the 5th-6th centuries. However, the Morfitt brothers and their father clearly didn’t get everything because Thomas Sheppard also heard about the Hornsea finds and made a personal visit to the site of the Hydro…

There is a very entertaining account of Sheppard’s encounter with the developer, which did not go according to plan, initially at any rate. Sheppard ran up against the same problem that the Morfitts faced, which Greenwell’s letter hints at, in the shape of the developer of the site. The developer sent the Hull Curator on his way with little ceremony, saying he was too busy with the new building work.

In the paper in the Hull Museum Publication series Sheppard writes that he withdrew to gather his wits before trying again. This time he pretended to have an interest in Turkish steam baths and engaged the developer in conversation. For some desperate minutes Sheppard admits he was on decidedly thin ice as he talked about the water supply, heating and provision of steam needed for a hydro before he succeeded in gaining the developer’s trust. Even so he daren’t mention the archaeological discoveries and he was immensely relieved when, as he was about to leave, the developer told Sheppard he could investigate ‘the other matter’ if he wanted.

Sheppard returned with one of his staff, planned and excavated the cemetery, and published an account of the Hornsea Hydro excavation in the Hull Museum Publications in 1919. This is where it gets interesting because in the text there is another of those intriguing oblique references to the Morfitt family which appear to be quite innocent, but if you are aware of the background they acquire an altogether different meaning:

‘Together with my assistant I visited Hornsea and found that a number of human bones had been excavated and that various small beads, and one or two brooches had been found, and had been divided among the workmen and others interested (my italics)…’

‘…although one or two objects had disappeared before we arrived, I fancy the remainder found a fit and proper home, as we excavated most of the skeletons’

T.Sheppard (ed.) Handbook to Hull and the East Riding – the chapter on Anglo-Saxons in East Yorkshire (Hull, 1922: p.234)

These comments would certainly rub salt in the wound. Sheppard had talked round the man who’d thrown the Morfitts off the site and then acquired the objects for Hull Museums, at the same time inferring the Morfitt collection was not a fit and proper home! What do you think?

To be continued…

Skulduggery at the museum and a bruising encounter

Thomas Sheppard

Following up on the recent blog about the Morfitt family and the plough pebbles given to Prof.William Boyd Dawkins for the Manchester Museum collection, it occurred to me that I’d only told part of the story. Thomas Sheppard (1876-1945) was the Curator of Hull Museums. Appointed in 1901 as curator of the Municipal Museum on Albion Street, he was advised to arrive at 10am, smoke a cigar, read the newspaper and take anything that was given…

It’s hard to imagine anyone working in a local authority being told to do this as part of their induction nowadays!  Sheppard, fortunately, disregarded his instructions and, when he retired 40 years later, he’d created seven new museums in Hull, some of them the first of their kind, such as Wilberforce House (1906) commemorating the campaign to abolish British slavery, the Fisheries and Whaling Museum (1912), and the Transport and Commerce Museum (1925). He was full of energy and was a passionate advocate for museums.

Sheppard achieved all this not only through hard work and determination but also by generating publicity. He was always putting snippets in the local and regional newspapers and  sometimes he’d disagree publicly about some point of detail in a report. This wasn’t simply correcting things ‘for the record’ but a way of stimulating a little controversy which made people sit up and take notice.

So it was that about 1908 when William Boyd Dawkins of Manchester Museum visited the sleepy village of Atwick in Holderness to see some archaeological sites known as pit dwellings, Sheppard was involved in a very public disagreement with Dawkins’ good friend, Revd William Gatty, and Canon William Greenwell, who claimed the pit dwellings were prehistoric and thousands of years old. The sites had been discovered by the Morfitt family. Sheppard said he’d found a piece of broken Wedgwood pottery in one of the pit dwellings, so they couldn’t be very old at all.

Sheppard seems to have had a good point but the tone of his comments contrasts very markedly with what he said a few years earlier when he was a regular visitor to Charlotte’ Cottage, home of the Morfitt family and the ‘East Coast collection of antiquities’. Sheppard congratulated the family on the recovery of a red deer skeleton on the Holderness Coast:

‘The care that has been taken in putting the numerous pieces together is characteristic of Messrs Morfitt, and the greatest credit is due to them.’

This was in 1898.

Aaron and Beaumont Morfitt with the red deer skeleton

William Morfitt’s sons, Aaron and Beaumont, had gone out at low tide and recovered the skeleton as the water rose about them. Is this extreme archaeology or what? And Sheppard often led guided tours of the Holderness coast in his capacity of secretary of various scientific societies. No visit was complete without seeing the Morfitt collection in Atwick. After 1903 that stopped. All Sheppard’s comments thereafter are critical of the family, belittling them and their collection. So what went wrong? What soured the relationship?

To answer that question we have to consider Sheppard’s reputation as a collector, summed up in the cartoon above. Sheppard is depicted as a highwayman ‘sticking up’ the local antiquities dealer’s! He didn’t create six new museums without being very acquisitive. His mania for collecting was legendary.

He also had a great sense of humour. Sheppard himself encouraged the portrayal of himself as a highwayman, the ‘snatcher man’ and a burglar. “The most scandalous stories come from his own lips” said Mary Chitty. It was how he marketed himself. He was the man who could snaffle an exhibit for the Hull Museums from under the very noses of rival collectors. A quick response by telegramme often secured the specimen for Hull before rivals had woken up to the fact that they were going begging. This, understandably, led to tension with other collectors. One was Canon William Greenwell of Durham. Perhaps it was inevitable that there would be a falling out over collecting between Sheppard and William Morfitt. There is a fascinating line in one of Canon William Greenwell’s letters (dated 30th December 1903) that refers to a violent encounter between Sheppard and old William Morfitt:

‘Mr Jeff told me in a letter received a few days ago that you had tackled Sheppard and given it him hot. I am glad to hear that you applied the stick to his back which I hope still smarts under it!’

This could just be a figure of speech but the implication is that old William Morfitt assaulted Sheppard. Perhaps he felt the Hull Curator had been disloyal or disingenuous and was trying to obtain antiquities that Morfitt felt were ‘on his patch’. Was the occasion when the wily Sheppard got caught out? If this is what happened then the reason for the sudden change in Sheppard’s attitude to the family becomes apparent.

We can see an example of this different attitude in the report of the acquisition of an Iron Age gold coin for Hull Museums which appeared in one of the Hull Museum Publications. William Morfitt had also found a gold coin at Atwick about the same time. This is a photograph. It is in the British Museum.

Iron Age gold coin

This is what Sheppard wrote about the coin he’d acquired for Hull Museums:

Coin reference

‘Another somewhat similar though not quite so fine’ I believe is an oblique reference to William Morfitt’s coin. Sheppard shows he’s aware of the discovery but he doesn’t acknowledge the finder, thereby denying him the ‘oxygen of publicity’. ‘Near Hornsea’ becomes a coded reference to the Morfitt family at Atwick. What do you think?

In a future blog I’ll show how Sheppard’s animosity towards the Morfitt family was expressed in a far more damaging way over the so-called Holderness harpoons during the early 1920s…