OLD-TIME PRACTICES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 May 1938, Page 9

OLD-TIME PRACTICES

USE OF BONES FOR SKATING. Fitz Stephen, in an account of London about the time of Thomas A’Becket tells how young people tied bone skates under their shoes and pushed themselves along on the ice by means of a pole with a bone spike at the end of it. These bone skates continued in use till iron skates came into fashion about 1676, and several from the site of the old town ditch outside the city wall are in the collection. A reminder of how very modern some of our commonest habits are is given by five tobacco pipes of clay. The oldest dates from about 1600 A.D., when smoking was a recent innovation in England, into which tobacco had been introduced not 40 years earlier. This pipe is very tiny. The others show how the bowls grew in size. There is a touch of history in a bellarmine or greybeard. These stoneware bottles, with a bearded face on the neck, were in general use from about 1550 to 1650 A.D., before the introduction of glass bottles. _ This one bears the arms of Anne of Cleves. A section of a wooden water pipe made of elm is a reminder that London’s original water mains were of wood. In the days when all gentlemen wore wigs, wigmakers used curlers of pipeclay. Two of these curiosities from the Eighteenth century are included.

A cockney’s shoe, found in Little Britain, dates from about 1400 A.D. It runs to a point which outdoes any modern vagary in shoe fashions. Jugs, bottles, tiles, and other objects of common use go to fill the picture of London’s daily life down the ages from the day when the Romans settled on the site of the old Celtic village to the period when the eminent Cockney, Arthur Phillip, born in Bread Street, hard by the Guildhall, sailed to found Sydney.