Ships' nails

Deptford Dockyard and Collective Resistance

The iron nails I have been researching were found in Deptford, where the Royal Naval Dockyard built and maintained warships between 1512 and 1869.2 London was Britain’s first slaving port, and Deptford was one of the first docks from which transatlantic slaving ships sailed.3

Iron nails were mostly used to fasten the timber planks of the deck, with wooden ‘tree’ nails being used to secure the timbers of the hull.4 These nails are all hand-forged, a technique that ensured they were strong enough to withstand the vast amounts of pressure they’d be put under at sea. They span the best part of two hundred years, between the late 1700s and the 1900s, although some could be older. Most of them are stamped with a broad arrow symbol, which has been used to signify military and Crown property since at least 1627.5 It was also used to brand the clothing of convicts incarcerated on board prison hulks, to mark the clothing of convicts transported to Australia, and in North America to brand trees selected to be felled by the British Navy.6

Economic historian John Habakkuk wrote: ‘Labour resistance to “labor-saving” machinery has been cited as the chief reason that England continued to produce nails by hand into the late 19th century.’7 Dockyards have a long history of collective resistance. There are multiple accounts of Deptford shipwrights (ship builders) striking against poor wages and proposals to revoke their right to ‘chips’ (offcuts of timber and spare materials left over after a ship was built). Chip materials were used to build the houses and fuel fires of the dockworkers when coal was scarce or expensive; they were an essential resource relied upon for survival.8 In July 1801 chips were replaced by ‘chip money’, an additional sixpence to shipwrights’ daily wages.9

The nails are a nexus point that delivers into our hands a remnant of human ecology that has normalised colonisation. This is what gives the nail its potency; within its material presence is condensed the economy of its making: the extraction of iron from the land; the processing of ingots and the hundreds of years of blacksmithing expertise; the industrial development of the foreshore that facilitated centuries of ship building and breaking in naval yards; the working lives defined by industrialisation and the profits of the Transatlantic Slave Trade that built London. They show us a history which has been normalised; that England is built on hundreds of years of colonialism and enslavement. These nails are not merely symbolic; they are involved directly in these processes of violence and exploitation. They are the material legacy of hundreds of years of colonial violence.

Hand-forged nails are relics of resistance to the industrial machines driven by the coercion and subjugation of London’s poor; machines that fuelled the city through the 19th, 20th and into the 21st century. They are inextricably connected to figures of working-class resistance: blacksmiths who knew the value of their labour and the quality of their craft; mudlarks sustained by an ever enclosed foreshore; rebelling dock workers who won better pay. The foreshore churns up the histories of London, rolls them in the wash of time and tide, eroding and exposing the fraught history of a city built on colonial violence, etched with working-class resistance, hundreds of years of people cast aside by the conveyor-belt force of linear, industrial progression.

The broad arrow rests on the Deptford foreshore. Its presence contains the story of our colonial history, branding people and stamping objects, tying them to the monarchy and empire, controlling their movements and uses through their designation as private property. Encountered by mudlarks, transported prisoners and indigenous Americans, the broad arrow maps the globalisation of the British Empire itself.