You know…when you’re stuck at home in lockdown, with nothing to do but watch Youtube videos about the Cinnamon Challenge, or how to tune a ukelele, or how to sing Christmas carols in LOLspeak – a skill which will surely impress all four of your grandparents come Christmas time – you start going a little stir-crazy, and you start thinking about the weirdest, craziest shit that you wouldn’t otherwise think of.

As I sat here at my desk, randomly watching another video of “Ten Celebrities Who Had it all and Blew it!…AGAIN!” or whatever, other, asinine twaddle people upload on the internet these days…my mind started wandering…as it’s want to do…to all kinds of random thoughts – like – what would people be buying other people for Christmas this year? Or for birthdays? Or anniversaries, or whatever? What kinds of desirable consumer-goods are there out in the world today which people just have to have? The latest iPhone? A new laptop? A sparkly purple pimp-mobile with tricked out chrome rims?

And I started to wonder…what were the biggest status symbols of times past? What did our ancestors wish they had, or did have, and used, to show off their status in the world, to other people, and to the higher-ups around them?

In this posting, I’ll be looking at some of the most common, uncommon, strangest, or most unlikely status symbols that have existed throughout history! These aren’t in any sort of order, but I’ll try and include as many as possible…

Status Symbol: Land
Symbolises: Wealth & Connections

Since the dawn of humanity, right up to the present day – ownership, control, use, and monetisation of pure, and simple land, has been a symbol of wealth, power, status and influence. From the lowest freeborn peasant, to Lord Muchstuff to the manor born, and even His Majesty King Morestuff, land has been important. From Ancient Rome to Medieval Europe, and even right up to the modern day – land has been important. Back then, they called it “freeholding” – today, we call it – “real estate” – but it’s still land.

In medieval times, in theory, the entirety of a kingdom’s land was the sole ownership of the king himself. The king gave parcels of land to nobility, clergy, the warrior aristocracy, lesser royals, or close friends and advisors, as gifts for them to own – either outright – or to rent. A nobleman who owned the land bore allegiance to the king (his “liege lord”), and was in charge of collecting the king’s taxes on the land he controlled, protecting the king’s subjects who lived on the land, and of upholding the laws and the King’s Peace.

Land – especially large parcels of it – were status symbols because if you owned land, it meant that you were in the good graces of the king, who thought enough of you to sell you or let you rent, in some cases, several thousand acres of his own kingdom. Being a landowner also meant that you could use the land to make money – either by farming, or by renting it out again to tenant-farmers, who farmed the land for you – paid you rent and taxes, and who did all the hard labour.

In many of the most essential ways – ownership of land, the status it brings, still exists today. The bigger someone’s house is, or the grander their address is, the more impressed we are. Would you prefer to receive an invite to a party at someone’s apartment? Or an invite to a party on someone’s private estate?

Status Symbol: Libraries & Books
Sybolises: Education

Apart from land, one of the greatest status symbols of history was literature: Physical books, scrolls, maps and documents. Whether or not they were accurate, reliable or even truthful, was rarely the point – the contents were not nearly as important as was the mere fact of personal ownership!

During the medieval era, and for a significant chunk of the Renaissance in the 1400s and 1500s, books were prized, treasured, intensely valuable possessions. Since all books had to be written out laboriously by hand using a quill pen and expensive paper or vellum, producing a book of any substantial size, regardless of its contents – was a very expensive, and time-consuming process. Paper had to be sourced, ink had to be ground up and diluted, quills had to be collected, dried, cut and shaped, and then you had to have the time, and the knowledge to write the contents of the book itself!

Because of this, owning books was a sign of extreme wealth, since having gone to all that effort to make one book – a writer was going to be sure to sell it for as much money as they could! But owning a book – or to be more precise – an entire library of books – indicated, not only great wealth – but also education. At a time when most people couldn’t read, and never had the chance to – books, scrolls and other documents, symbolised access to education and higher learning, at a time when most people had neither the time, funds, or resources to learn how to read or write.

The status of books died away somewhat by the 1500s and 1600s, with the steady spread of the printing press, which made books significantly cheaper and faster to produce, but their status remained high enough that many grand country houses built in the 1600s, 1700s, and even the 1800s, were constructed with expansive libraries and reading-rooms to show off the owner’s wealth of collected knowledge.

Status Symbol: Obesity
Symbolises: Ease of living

For millennia throughout human history, one of the most prominent status symbols ever was obesity. At a time when growing, farming, hunting, catching, preparing and preserving food was extremely labour-intensive, and when physical labour such as tree-felling, lumberjacking, mining, farming, and other occupations burned up precious calories, obesity of any kind was virtually unheard of. Because of this, obesity, and pale skin were considered signs of wealth, privilege and plenty. Not for nothing is the Chinese God of Prosperity – Cai Sen – (often mistaken for Buddha) – traditionally depicted as being good-natured, happy, and extremely obese!

To be able to achieve such awe-inspiring obesity, you had to have not only enough food to eat, but enough servants to do all the work which you therefore wouldn’t need to, allowing you to live a life of luxury! This also meant that you could stay indoors, away from the sun while enjoying the high-life. This preference for pale skin and rich living can be seen in figures such as Queen Elizabeth the First, who famously slathered white lead makeup on her face to appear pale and beautiful, and in the fairytale “Snow White” where she is described as having hair as black as ebony, lips as red as blood, and skin as white and pure as snow.

Status Symbol: Gout
Symbolises: A rich diet & access to expensive foods

Gout is a condition where hard lumps of crystalised uric acid (lumps known as tophus or tophi) build up in a person’s joints – in particular, the toes and knuckles (but most commonly in the big toe), caused by a heavy diet of red meat, sugar, salt, and excessive consumption of alcohol and other rich, fatty foods. As such foods as sugar, chocolate, and cakes were rare, and beef and mutton were expensive, being able to eat as much of this stuff as you wanted, to the extent that you could contract gout from it was seen as a sign of extreme affluence!

Despite the, at times, excruciating pain, which could render a gout-sufferer all but immobile for days, or even weeks on end, until the tophi broke up or were dissolved (usually aided by applying heat to the affected joints) – gout was seen as a huge status-symbol – it was almost fashionable to try and get it, because it proved how immensely privileged and wealthy you had to be! Because of this association with wealth, privilege and a rich diet, for centuries, gout has been known as “The Disease of Kings“.

One of the most famous sufferers of this ‘royal disease’ was His Royal Highness, Prince George, Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent – later known as George IV. Famous for throwing extravagant banquets, George IV was a lecherous whoremonger, known for chasing two things: Food, and women. His waistline exploded and his obesity shot up. This on its own would’ve been bad enough, but his nonstop indulgence caused agonising flare-ups of gout, which would’ve been treated by warming, resting and elevating the foot, and by taking copious amounts of painkillers – usually in the form of tincture of laudanum – a mix of opium and alcohol – the most common painkilling drug of the era.

Status Symbol: Sugar, Chocolate, Jelly, Ice-Cream, etc.
Symbolises: Extravagant living!

In medieval times, and even for hundreds of years afterwards, certain foods were so hard to obtain or hard to produce that they were – right up until the modern era – considered luxuries. Anybody who could afford to eat these foods were living high on the hog! Here’s a list of some of the various foods that were once considered to be highly desirable status foods!…and they’re not always the ones you might expect.

Sugar

For centuries, access to sugar was incredibly rare. Extracted from sugar-cane, grown on large plantations in tropical climates, and processed into raw sugar-crystals before being exported, sugar was a supreme luxury in the Renaissance era, when getting to enjoy it in Europe meant that it had to come on the most amazing, round-the-world voyages from the Far East, or the Caribbean. As late as the 1700s, King George III declared that in the event of war with the American colonies, the French, or the Spanish, and their colonial possessions in the new world, Britain could lose just about anything except its sugar plantations – the enormous amounts of money that sugar brought to Britain were too valuable to risk falling into enemy hands!

Sugar did not start becoming cheaper until the 1800s, when it was discovered that sugar could also be extracted from the much more easily-grown sugar-beet, which could be cultivated in more temperate climates. Before this time, sugar had been so rare that only those with significant wealth were able to afford it.

Chocolate!

Some are convinced that it’s evil in physical form, others are sure that this is the very food of the gods themselves! For centuries, chocolate has been one of mankind’s most sought-after treats, but for much of history, chocolate was nigh on inaccessible, and even when it was, it would be centuries before it could be enjoyed by the masses.

Harvested from enormous cacao-pods grown in tropical countries, chocolate comes from the cocoa beans stored inside the pods. And here’s something you may or may not know: Chocolate in its raw state tastes disgusting!

It’s bitter and rank and nigh inedible! And even if you could get a hold of it, the processes to extract chocolate from the beans were extensive!

First, the beans have to be dried, then crushed, then ground up, and finally, the pure cocoa has to be mixed with other ingredients to make it palatable – such as sugar, water, eggs or milk. Since sugar was already so expensive, combining sugar AND chocolate was considered exceptionally extravagant.

For centuries, chocolate wasn’t even a food – it was a drink! From the 1500s until the 1800s, chocolate existed in only one form: as drinking-chocolate. What we’d call today – hot chocolate. The only way to physically eat chocolate was to incorporate the cocoa and sugar mass into something else – like a cake, pie, tart or a tray of cookies. Eating chocolate on its own did not happen until the Victorian era. Only when this became possible, and mass production of the first chocolate bars began, was chocolate finally democratised to the peasants and plebians!

Pineapples

Introduced to Europe in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the humble pineapple was the latest fruit from the New World to capture the imagination of the old. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and because pineapples were very difficult, indeed, almost impossible, to grow in a European climate, getting your hands on one was no mean feat!

To grow pineapples in Europe, the only way to do it was to cultivate the plants in a large, glass greenhouse, usually on the private estate of some wealthy landowner. The warm, humid micro-climate inside a greenhouse allowed pineapples to grow, and owning and getting to eat pineapples was an enormous luxury! Greenhouses designed or built specifically for growing pineapples became known as ‘Pineries’. Because why not?

Just being able to see, and hold a pineapple – never mind eating one! – was such a rarity that wealthy people used to – and I’m not making this up – RENT – pineapples from other people! Yes indeed! You could go up to a guy, a friend of yours, perhaps, whom you knew owned a pineapple, and you could ask to borrow or rent it! You know, to have it as a centerpiece at your latest dinner-party or banquet! Showing off a physical pineapple showed that not only were you rich enough to rent one, but that you had connections to people who could grow them – a massive brag back in the 1700s!

Jelly & Ice-Cream

In an age before freezers, refrigerators and instant-foods, both jelly and ice-cream were considered extreme luxuries. Jelly – produced by boiling out the gelatin from the hooves of animal-trotters – took hours to create, with the gelatin being continually boiled, skimmed, refined, and boiled again, to extract pure gelatin, which could then be flavoured, shaped and coloured to produce jelly.

Ice cream, made from eggs, cream, sugar and flavourings, was another extreme luxury. Sugar was expensive, and without freezers, the only way to produce ice-cream was to place it in a bath of salt and ice – two more very expensive commodities – which again, increased the price (and status) of ice-cream.

It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that ice-cream could be produced relatively easily at home, or on an industrial scale, with the invention of hand-cranked ice-cream machines, which whipped the mixture inside a metal canister surrounded by ice and salt. This process made ice-cream cheaper, faster to produce, and better-tasting, as the aerated mixture (caused by the constant stirring and freezing) was lighter, and smoother on the tongue.

Status Symbol: The Fountain Pen.
Symbolises: Modern Technology and Taste!

Since the dawn of writing, thousands of years ago, mankind has struggled and striven for countless lifetimes, to produce a writing instrument which contained its own ink-supply, and which could operate independently of a separate inkwell. After many false starts and mistakes…and a lot of mess…the fountain pen finally came of age in the late 1800s, with visionaries such as George Parker and Lewis E. Waterman creating the essential elements that would make the modern fountain pen possible.

While fountain pens in the early days were laughably simplistic items, comprising little more than a cap, a nib, feed, section to hold it all together, and a tank for the ink – they were incredibly expensive, and were considered real luxury items! Owning one of these newfangled “reservoir pens” as they were originally called, was a mark of pride and distinction!

From the late 1800s until the middle of the 20th century, most fountain pens were expensive, and while cheap “third-tier” pens did exist, the cost of a new fountain pen was often out of the reach of most people, which is why institutions like schools, banks, hotels, etc, continued to rely on old-fashioned dip pens, well into the 20th century. They were simply cheaper, easier to use, and easier to replace.

Although ballpoint pens have largely usurped the fountain pen’s throne since the end of the Second World War, fountain pens are making a big comeback in the 21st century, and there is an avid global community of collectors, users, repair-technicians and manufacturers still thriving today.

As the old Jack Buchanan song goes: “When the clock strikes four, everything stops for tea!”.

But – why does it? In this posting, we’ll be looking at the history of, arguably, the world’s most popular beverage – tea – and everything that goes along with it. What tea is, where it comes from, how it came to be, the customs surrounding tea and its consumption, and the utensils and paraphernalia used around the world in the consumption of tea!

Due to tea’s extensive history and variations, there’s no way that I’ll cover everything in just one posting, so I may do another one at a future date. So if something you wanted to read or know about isn’t included here, then it may be included in a possible follow-up posting later down the line.

Not for All the Tea in China!

Tea as we think of it today, was first cultivated in China as early as 4000B.C., but it was not harvested for its beverage qualities – instead, it was eaten as a vegetable! Tea was not consumed as a beverage until sometime between 300-500A.D. However, the first incarnation of tea was prepared very differently from how we think of it today.

During the Chinese Tang Dynasty (618-907A.D.), the accepted practice was to crush and grind tea-leaves in a pestle and mortar. The crushed leaves were beaten and ground up until they had been reduced to powder. This allowed the powdered leaves to be compressed into bricks or cakes, which would be easier to pack, and easier to transport, keeping their flavour for longer over long trade-journeys, which in those days could take several days, weeks, or even months!

When it came time to drink the tea, the cake or brick was simply crumbled into powder again, and water was added on top to dilute it. In Chinese, this was known as “mocha”. When the Japanese adopted this practice, they also took the Chinese loanword along with it, and ‘mocha’ became the Japanese ‘Matcha’. This remained the norm until the 1300s, when the practice changed yet again, to steeping dried tea-leaves, instead of tea-powder, much as how we do today.

Tea on the Move

For centuries, tea remained a largely Chinese secret. Tea was traded, along with silk, porcelain and valuable spices, around Asia, and along the fabled Silk Road network. However, things started to change in the 1500s and 1600s, with Dutch sailors exploring the Far East. It was at this time that Europeans were first exposed to the beverage of tea.

Like anything new – tea, coffee, chocolate, kale juice and quinoa – tea was first consumed for its medicinal properties, either real, or imagined. In Europe, where the main beverages were beer, ale and wine, due to how polluted the water was, tea was a welcome and surprising change, and slowly, it spread around Europe.

Enjoying a Cuppa

Tea is believed to have been brought in England in 1661. Why such a precise date? Because that’s when a Portuguese woman named Catherine of Braganza sailed from her homeland to wed England’s King Charles II. Famously barren, Catherine produced no children, and this left Charles unable to sire a legitimate heir to the throne, however, the queen did give birth to something arguably much more important than children – British tea-culture!

As part of her dowry, Catherine brought to England, not only gold, silver and jewels, but also exotic spices and expensive teas. Noble families, wishing to ingratiate and imitate their new queen, took to copying her drinking habits, which included consuming tea – but not only consuming it, but also enjoying it, and making an event of it – We have Queen Catherine to thank for the very British custom of ‘taking tea’.

In its early days, tea was extremely rare in Britain, and prohibitively expensive! China had a stranglehold monopoly on the substance, and the one-and-only port in China which was open to foreign traders, and therefore, the only port open to exporting tea, was the port of Canton in southern China.

Because of such restrictive trading regulations, the amount of tea that Britain (and other European countries) could import each year was very small, and this drove the price up to such an insane level that only the nobility could afford it. Tea was drunk sparingly, and the whole custom of preparing, and serving tea was a ritual presided over almost exclusively by the women of a household. Servants were rarely, if ever, permitted to touch tea, and the dried tea-leaves, imported all the way from China, were locked inside elaborately decorated tea-caddies, lined with foil paper to protect the flavour, and which were made of anything from wood inlaid with ivory, to tortoiseshell, and even – if you could afford it – solid silver!

The Word ‘Tea’

‘Tea’ is believed to have been a corruption of ‘te’, the word used for the beverage in the Chinese port of Xiamen, one of the first to open to trade with the West (particularly, the Dutch, who were the first to import tea to Europe). In most Asian languages (including Chinese and Japanese), the word for ‘tea’ is ‘cha’.

China from China, What Else Could be Finer?

What else, indeed?

The Chinese had been creating hard-paste ceramics…what we call ‘porcelain’ today…since at least the 6th century. Hard-paste porcelain was tricky to make – it required a very high firing temperature, and the mixture of various powders used to form the paste from which the porcelain was made had to be carefully measured and prepared. The best quality porcelain-clay preparations were often left alone to age…in many cases, for several decades!

After the maturation or ‘souring’ process, during which the clay-mix had been left to rest, the clay had to be rehydrated before it could be worked. To do this, potters simply opened their flies and pissed into it! The urine reintroduced moisture into the clay and made it more plastic, which made it easier to shape and mold into whatever it was that you were trying to make!…Don’t worry, the firing process killed off any bacteria in the clay, rendering the porcelain clean and sterile when it was removed from the kiln.

Chinese porcelain was heavily imported by Europeans in the 1600s and 1700s, along with tea, but transporting porcelain such long distances was expensive, if only for the fact that trying to transport crates of chinaware on a rocking, rolling sailing ship is a recipe for disaster. Because of this, there were numerous attempts to recreate Chinese-style porcelain in Europe – particularly in Britain, and the Low Countries.

Actual porcelain ceramics are made using a mixture of fine clay powder, sand and a tiny amount of the secret ingredient – soapstone – basically talcum-powder. Working this mixture created a type of porcelain which could be shaped, and fired and made into ceramics which were crisp, white, incredibly thin to the point of translucency…and, most importantly, where tea is concerned…shatter-resistant!

One of the reasons why European attempts to recreate Chinese porcelain failed was because of this one element. They had no resistance to thermal shock – the sudden change in temperature caused by pouring boiling hot tea into a cold, porcelain tea-bowl or teacup. People who couldn’t afford fine china bought the cheaper, lower quality ceramics, which the wealthy bought the more stable, thinner, stronger and more suitable expensive china. This is the supposed origin of poor people adding milk to their tea first, whereas wealthier drinkers added milk afterwards…or not at all! The cold milk took the sting out of the heat of the tea when it was poured into the cup, so that the porcelain wouldn’t crack under the temperature-change.

Eventually, Europeans did manage to create their own form of porcelain, independent from Chinese ceramicists – it was called bone china. Depending on the recipe used, bone-china clay was comprised of china-stone powder (a type of granite), china-clay (kaolinite), and, depending on the formulation of the recipe – anywhere from 30-60% bone…as in actual bone. The bones of dead animals were cleaned, crushed, ground up into powder, and this was added to the mixture. The translucency, thinness and strength of bone china (four bone-china cups can hold up a car, in case you’re wondering), are all due to the addition of bone-powder into the clay mix.

Types of Teaware

When the custom of tea-drinking was introduced to Europe in the 1600s, Chinese porcelain came along with it, and these were the vessels first used to prepare and drink tea. The earliest European teaware, manufactured in the 1700s, closely imitated Chinese teaware, both in size, style, and even decoration. Transfer-printed imagery (engraved on a copper plate, covered with ink and then transferred onto thin paper which was then pressed onto the finished ceramics before firing) often featured Chinese-style motifs, such as gardens, pagodas and flowers.

European Teaware

The earliest European teacups imitated Chinese ones so much that they did not come with handles – instead, they resembled the Chinese ‘chawan’ (‘tea-bowl’), varying from them only in decoration and size. The Western practice of putting a separate handle on the side of a teacup would not become common until the early 1800s.

In time, the practice of adding milk, and later, sugar, to tea, spurred the creation of the traditional three-piece tea-set, of teapot, milk-jug or creamer, and sugar-bowl. Like tea, sugar in the 1600s and 1700s was very expensive, and was imported largely from Caribbean and South-American sugar-plantations, where it was extracted from sugar-cane crops. Because of the expense of sugar, some people added honey to their tea instead.

Asian Teaware

Chinese, and other Asian teaware has hardly changed in centuries. Teacups have varied in style and decoration, but hardly ever in terms of size, or shape. Since most Asian people don’t add anything to their tea, their teacups are generally smaller than European ones, and their tea-sets are less elaborate – comprising of just the teapot and a set of teacups, and perhaps a matching tea-tray or more likely – a tea-board, to catch spills, or to rise and wash the teacups between uses.

Apart from this, the Chinese teacup did evolve in one way: The creation of the ‘Gaiwan‘.

‘Gaiwan’ literally translates as ‘lidded bowl’ in Chinese. ‘Gai’ is lid, or cover, and ‘wan’ (or ‘woon’, in Cantonese) is ‘bowl’.

The compound word of ‘gaiwan’ refers to a specific type of Chinese teacup-set, comprised of a teacup or bowl with a wide, flaring lip, small base and sloping sides, a matching, circular lid with a lifting-knob on top, and a matching saucer underneath, into which the base of the teacup fits snugly.

Gaiwan have been around for centuries, and their creation dates back to the Ming Dynasty, sometime in the 1400s. Gaiwan were used, either for brewing tea, or for drinking it. The lid served to either stir the tea to help it brew, to cool it down before drinking, or to hold back the loose tea-leaves while drinking from the cup. The lid also stopped the heat of the boiling water from escaping, keeping the tea warm for a longer time between sips.

Russian Teaware

Another country famous for its teaware is Russia, where the practice of taking tea is possibly more different than anywhere else on earth.

Russia was the land which originated the tea-preparing device known as the samovar – literally – ‘self-boiler’ – a large (usually brass) tea-urn comprised of a central cistern, fire-tube and chimney, drip-tray and teapot.

In most cases, the Russian practice of tea-drinking was to fill the samovar’s cistern with water. The chimney or firebox was filled with paper and wood-shavings, and then set on fire. Refueling the samovar was simply a matter of dropping kindling, or pine-cones down the chimney. Ash was removed through a little door underneath the firebox. A stand set on top of the chimney allowed a teapot with tea-concentrate to be placed over the fire, keeping it hot. The tea-concentrate was very, very, very concentrated tea, with multiple spoons of tea inside a relatively small pot filled with hot water.

The drinker would pour a small amount of the concentrate into their teacup or tea-glass, replace the pot on top of the samovar, and then, using the spigot on the front of the samovar – fill the rest of their glass with boiling water. This would dilute the tea-concentrate, making it more mellow, and pleasant to drink.

Like with other countries with a tea-culture, in Russia, it became popular to make an event out of drinking tea, and tea was often consumed along with sweet pastries, cakes and cookies. The practice of using a samovar spread widely throughout eastern Europe and around the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, leading to regional variations and different national styles and designs.

The Art of Taking Tea

Since earliest times, the practice of drinking or ‘taking’ tea has always been surrounded by rituals and customs. Gradually, early tea-drinking habits developed into regional customs and traditions, and these led to a wide range of ways to enjoy tea all around the world.

In China, and Asian countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, the tradition of ‘yumcha’ still exists today – where people gather for lunch or a morning or afternoon meal, consisting of tea, and eating dumplings, buns and rolls. The words ‘yum cha’ literally mean ‘drink tea’. Going out for yumcha is usually a special occasion, done with family and friends, or visiting relatives and takes place at specialised yumcha restaurants.

In Britain, and many former British colonies such as Canada and Australia, the tradition of ‘afternoon tea’ is a longstanding tradition dating back to early Victorian times. It was said to be invented by Anna Maria Russell, the Duchess of Bedford, a longtime personal friend of Queen Victoria.

Frustrated by the long wait between luncheon and dinner (which in Victorian times, could be taken as late as 8:00pm), the Duchess took up the habit of having a light meal in the late-afternoon, around three or four o’clock, consisting of tea, cakes, sandwiches and scones. This, the Duchess hoped, would hold her over until dinner, which could be anywhere from two to four hours later in the day. She enjoyed this custom so much that it started spreading throughout the court, and it became fashionable to invite friends over for afternoon tea – a quiet time in the middle of the day when one could relax with a light snack, a drink, and a chance to catch up on the gossip of the day. Afternoon tea remains a popular custom in the Anglosphere to this day.

Tea Today

The beverage of tea, as well as the meals and events that it inspired, remain as popular today as they ever were. Even when we have other drinks like coffee, or soda, milk, and a wide range of flowery and herbal infusions – tea remains one of, if not the, most popular beverage in the world. Hotels from as far afield as the Ritz in London to the Windsor in Melbourne, or the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, still serve high tea and afternoon tea today. In Malaysia and Singapore, you can buy my personal favourite type of tea: ‘Teh Tarik’ (‘Pulled Tea’) – which is black tea mixed with condensed milk and sugar…and which is then poured repeatedly from mug to mug, over and over again to froth it up and cool it down, leaving you with a rich, sweet, warm, frothy drink! Mmmm-mmmm!

“What do you make of it, Watson?”
“Why should I make anything of it? The fellow came to see you!”
“Ah! But what kind of a fellow? Let me hear you reconstruct him – from his walking stick – by our usual method of elementary observation!”

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (B. Rathbone, N. Bruce, 1939).

In this posting, we’ll be looking at the history, styles, designs, types, anatomy and function of walking sticks, an aide and accessory so old that it goes far into prehistoric times. So – as Pierce Brosnan said in “Around the World in 80 Days”: ‘I trust you have some stout shoes? We may do a little walking!‘.

What Is a Walking Stick?

A walking stick is a mobility-aid or fashion accessory which has existed since time immemorial. It has lasted in one form or another for literally thousands of years, and they continue to be manufactured in the modern world, for everything from looking stylish, to keeping your balance, for hiking, camping, and mountain-climbing.

A standard walking stick varies considerably in length, anywhere from about 30 to 45 inches. Some sticks can be five or six feet in length! But, where do they come from?

A History of Walking Sticks

Walking sticks of every size, shape and description have existed for millennia. Every culture and civilisation, from Ancient Rome to Ancient China, pre-Columbian America and the Middle East.

For much of history, a walking stick was…simply…a stick. A branch of convenient length, thickness and strength, which could be cut, shaved and modified to be used as a mobility aid.

Walking sticks as we might recognise them today, started becoming a thing in the 1500s and 1600s. Since medieval times, it had been de-rigeur for gentlemen to carry a sword while out in public, as a means of self-defense. However, this started being seen as confrontational, and by the 1600s, was no longer socially acceptable, unless it was part of military dress-uniform or other similar situations.

In a time when most people walked everywhere, unless they owned a horse and carriage, or a boat and lived near a major river, walking sticks naturally took the place of the sword in polite society. Remember also, that paved roads (with the exception of the Ancient Romans, perhaps) are a relatively modern phenomenon. Muddy tracks, cobblestones, and dirt or grassy roads were the norm for much of human history. Using a stick while walking helped you keep your balance while navigating pot-holes, ruts and gullies worn into the road by other travelers.

Some people, such as the elderly, the infirm or those suffering from some permanent injury or disability, might well have carried a stick for purely practical purposes, to help them move around, but increasingly, carrying a walking stick was seen largely as being a fashion accessory. Much like how you might carry around your smartphone today, back in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s, carrying around a walking-stick was done for both practical, and fashionable reasons. Having a flashy walking stick, possibly made of rare or expensive materials, was seen as a status-symbol, and they lent an air of superiority and higher social standing to the user.

Apart from this, with most people walking everywhere, a stick was useful on a practical level. Carrying a stick took some of the pressure and wear off of your shoes and feet – important, when you might well be walking for several hours every day. Having something to lean or rest on, was important for the purpose of personal comfort.

The Anatomy of a Walking Stick

A classic walking stick was typically comprised of four parts. I’ll go through each one in detail and give a bit of their history.

The Shaft

The shaft is the length of wood which makes up the walking-stick’s body. Traditionally, shafts were made out of a wide variety of wood, such as oak, blackthorn, etc. Some sticks were made of brass, some were even made of ivory – the long tusks of the narwhal were a popular material for making walking-sticks.

In some instances, walking sticks were made out of more unusual substances. A popular material for shafts was rattan cane, which was both strong, and flexible. They were particularly popular in the Far East, but also in Britain; such a type of cane is mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes novel “The Hound of the Baskervilles“.

The Handle

The handle, or grip of the walking stick is the area at the top, grasped by the user’s hand. Some walking sticks had very plain, curved wooden handles, which were simply the end of the shaft being bent over to create a hook. However, from the 1600s onwards, and even into the modern day – handles made of a wide variety of materials have been popular.

Handles have been made of brass, silver, ivory, glass, pool-balls, horn, tusk, bits of pipe…almost anything and everything imaginable. During the 1700s and 1800s, silver, brass, wood, bone and ivory were the most popular materials for making walking stick handles.

Handle shapes were as varied as their materials. The handle might be a simple knob, a hook, or the T-shaped derby-style handle. Handles in the form of an upturned L, which were sometimes made in the form of animal or bird-heads, such as dogs, eagle, rabbits and almost anything else imaginable, were also very popular.

The Collar

The collar is the ring directly underneath the handle, where it joins to the shaft. Not every walking stick has a collar, and not all collars are functional. Some exist purely for aesthetic reasons. Popular collar materials were silver, brass and ivory.

The Ferrule

The ferrule is the end-cap, foot, or base, right at the bottom of the walking-stick. It serves two purposes – to protect the end of the shaft, and to provide the user of the stick with grip, to stop the base of the walking stick from sliding around.

Interesting fact: Ferrule lengths varied over history. As a rule – the longer your ferrule is, the older your stick is. The shorter your ferrule is, the more modern your stick is!

Now, you might ask – why?

Remember when I said further up, that one of the main uses for walking sticks was to navigate terrible roads and paths, to help you keep your balance, and stop you from falling over? Well – because roads were, as a rule, unpaved until recent times – it was very common for a walking-stick to sink into the mud or slop or ooze, especially if you had to put weight on it. This was disadvantageous, because the mud and gunk would get all over the bottom half of your stick…eewww…!!

But also – the mud, or more specifically, the water and moisture, would damage the wood of which your stick was made. Constant exposure to water and mud would cause the wood to swell and crack, and for the end of the stick to wear down. To prevent this, or at least, to minimise it, ferrules were added to the bottom of sticks, and they were made much longer (up to six or eight inches, in some cases!) so as to protect as much of the stick as possible.

As paved roads and pavements became more common, the necessity to protect so much of the lower half of the stick was reduced, and so walking stick ferrules generally get shorter and shorter. In the modern era, most ferrules aren’t more than an inch or two long, compared with four or eight inches, in times past.

The Purpose of Carrying a Stick

While the most common reason for carrying a walking stick was either as a fashion-accessory, or as a mobility aid of some variety, there were many other reasons for carrying one, and these expanded throughout the centuries.

Self-Defense

One of the most common reasons why people carry walking sticks, even into the modern era – is for the purposes of self-defense. State-run police-forces did not become a regular thing until the early 1800s, Because of this, carrying a walking stick when you went out served as both a fashion accessory, but also as a personal defense weapon. With the right skills, someone could disarm or disable an attacker with very little effort.

The heyday for sticks used for personal defense was the Victorian era. A method of self defense was developed during this time, known as “singlestick fighting”. It was a series of classes and courses, which you could take to learn how to defend yourself – using a single walking stick – hence the name. Singlestick fighting was incredibly popular – and photographic manuals existed, demonstrating how to disarm someone, how to trip someone up, how to duck, block and parry an attacker’s movements, and how to turn disadvantages (such as having a shorter stick) into an advantage.

Along with the art of singlestick fighting, walking stick manufacturers also made sticks with self-defense capabilities built into them – usually, these were custom-ordered walking sticks, made specifically to a client’s needs. Walking sticks with spring-loaded bayonets, walking sticks with lead-shot inside the handle, and most famously – walking-sticks with swords or daggers inside the handle (“swordsticks”), were particularly common.

Gadget Sticks

Also called “systems sticks”, a gadget stick was a walking stick which served at least two functions. Gadget sticks varied from the mundane, to the fantastic, and everything in between. Gadget sticks had all kinds of additional accessories added into them – compasses, watches, whiskey-flasks hidden inside the shafts, telescopes, and even firearms – Valentin Zhukovsky, in the James Bond films, has a walking-stick with a built-in rifle.

Gadget-sticks were immensely popular, and today, a really unusual, or elaborate gadget-stick can be worth several hundreds, or even thousands of dollars. The more intricate and complicated it is, the more desirable it becomes, and the more value it retains.

While some gadget-sticks had gadgets inside them purely for the fun of it (a whiskey-flask, a compass, a watch, etc, etc), some gadget-sticks were manufactured specifically for particular occupations. For example, an explorer or a surveyor’s stick might have a telescope, a yardstick, a spirit-level and a compass. A doctor’s stick might have pill-boxes and a thermometer. A writer’s stick might have space for pens, spare nibs and a bottle of ink.

The End of the Walking Stick

The walking stick as an aid for mobility has never disappeared, and some people still collect and use antique and vintage sticks for walking on a regular basis. Others still buy their sticks brand-new and use them every day. A friend of mine has carried the same curved wooden walking stick for years, to help with the bodily imbalance caused by his back issues.

But the days of carrying a walking stick as a fashion accessory does seem to have died away. While some people do still uphold this, they do tend to be a minority. The fact is that a walking stick is seldom practical as an accessory in the modern world. We have so many other things to think about and carry – phones, chargers, earphones, tablets, laptops…the last thing we need to carry around is a purely decorative piece of wood.

Quite apart from anything else, one of the main reasons why walking sticks started dying out as a fashion accessory is due to the advancements in transportation.

Prior to the late 1800s, most people walked almost everywhere. Carriages were expensive, trains didn’t reach all places, and bicycles were rare. Because of this, walking was the main mode of transport, which meant that carrying a walking stick, either to aid with balance, to help ease the pressure on one’s feet, or simply as an accessory – was considered acceptable.

However, once cars became popular, and people started doing much less walking in general, sticks fell by the wayside as being impractical and unnecessary. Their popularity continued through the 20th century, but they started being seen increasingly as being more of mobility aid, and more for older people than younger people, and less as a fashion accessory than they once were, which all contributed to their general lack of use in the modern world.

People are always fascinated about ‘the other’, ‘those people’, ‘them’, and ‘how the other half live’. Love them or hate them, people at the top – be they kings, queens, presidents, or multibillionaire business moguls, the Nouveau Riche and the Old Money, the landed gentry and the aristocracy – they have always held a fascination for us, whether we would wish to admit this fact or not.

Reality TV shows like ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’, ‘Pads’ and ‘The lives of Super-Rich Billionaires’ and countless others, continue to draw crowds because they allow us to see into a world that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience…unless we were really, really well-connected and had lots of friends in high places.

In this posting, I’ll be looking at the original celebrities – the aristocracy. Before the days of A-list actors, fashionistas, socialites and boppy boy-bands, the ‘rich and famous’ were those situated in traditional positions of power – royalty, aristocracy, and so-on. There are many aristocratic titles, and I’ll be using the traditional British aristocratic ranking system for this posting (yes, there is a ranking-system), but I’ll include as many titles as I can. So, let’s begin…

Ranks and Titles

Title: Emperor (Fem: Empress) 
Area of Rulership: Empire
Form of Address: Your Majesty

On the royal-aristocratic pyramid of power, the emperor sits at the very pinnacle. In the past, there were a lot of emperors – the Emperor of China, the Emperor of Japan, the Holy Roman Emperor, Ancient Roman Emperors, King-Emperors, etc.

The only emperor officially recognised in the world today is the Emperor of Japan. The last Emperor of China was dethroned in 1912, and abdicated in the 1920s. His home, the Imperial Palace in Peking, is now the Forbidden City Museum. It remains the largest palace-complex in the world by sheer size.

Title: King (Fem. Queen)
Area of Rulership: Kingdom
Form of Address: Your Majesty

Below the Emperor comes the King. At one time in history, there were hundreds of kings all over the world. Before the rise of modern nation-states as we know them today, places like China, Europe, Britain, India and many others had loads of little kings ruling little kingdoms. The idea that a king ruled an entire country is a pretty modern concept; Italy and Germany only became the countries that we recognise today in the 1870s, which isn’t that long ago!

While the days of loads of little kings and little kingdoms are gone, there are still a lot of kings and queens around. Britain, Spain, Cambodia, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Malaysia, Thailand, and Tonga, are just some of the countries which are still kingdoms. Some of these countries even lost or gave up their royal families, only for them to be reinstated (or ‘restored’, which is the official term) later on by popular demand. These include England (1660), Spain (1975), and Cambodia (1993). And they’re not the only ones – almost since the day of his birth, Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia has been fighting to get the Yugoslav Monarchy restored, despite the fact that he doesn’t live there, and nor does he speak a word of Yugoslavian! The monarchy was forced to flee from their homeland in the 1940s during the Second World War and couldn’t return home again due to the rise of communism. Ever since, the Yugoslavian Royal Family (now based in Britain), have been kings (or at least princes) without a country.

By the way, a king always outranks a Queen. And because nobody can ever outrank the monarch in precedence, a queen regnant (a queen who inherited the throne and rules in her own right) is never married to a king, since her husband would then outrank her, and nobody can outrank the queen. That’s why her husband is given the title of Prince, Duke, or some other lesser title. A queen who is the wife of a ruling king is known as a Queen Consort.

The one and only Prince Consort in history was Prince Albert, husband to Queen Victoria, who received the title at Victoria’s insistence, when the government insisted that she couldn’t give him the title of ‘King’ (for the reasons stated above).

In most countries today, a king is a ceremonial figurehead who acts as an ambassador for the culture, history, and social harmony of his kingdom. But in times past, kings were genuine military leaders. While today this role is largely of a morale-boosting nature and their position as head of the armed forces (in most countries) is purely ceremonial, in the past, being king really did involve going into battle, sword swinging and guns blazing! The last English king to ride into battle alongside his troops was George II, in the 1700s!

While kings who rode into battle with their troops, drums playing and colours flying is a romantic and gallant image, the truth was that while kings were often the most heavily armed, armoured and protected individuals on the battlefield, they were just as susceptible to danger as everybody else. King Richard I, of Richard-the-Lionheart fame, was killed in battle in 1199 when he was shot in the shoulder…by a little boy wielding a crossbow!

Title: Prince (Fem. Princess).
Area of Rulership: Principality
Form of Address: Your Royal Highness

Aah, princes. We like princes! Tall, young, dashing and handsome! Everybody knows what a prince is, and everybody has this image in their heads of what a prince should be. Someone rich, accomplished, charming, sweet, someone who is irresistible to women, and who should, ideally, have some sort of militaristic background. Not for nothing has Disney been milking this cow for nearly 100 years, and the Brothers Grimm before that! Alongside the Prince is the Princess, what every little girl aspires to be, or at least treated like.

Princes are traditionally the male children and grandchildren of monarchical rulers. In popular lore, princes are the cute hotties who rock the best threads at parties, slay dragons, rescue damsels in distress, and who have absolutely scandalous social lives. In some respects, none of that has changed!

Princes are typically divided into two categories – those who are the children of monarchs, and those who are monarchs in their own right. A prince who rules as a monarch rules an area of land known as a principality (eg.: The Principality of Monaco) and is known as a Sovereign Prince. A prince who is heir-apparent to a throne and kingdom is typically known as a Crown Prince (as in, the next person to inherit the crown). In Britain, the same title is the Prince of Wales.

Famous princes throughout history included playboy Prince Edward (Edward VII of England), Charles Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie), and Henry, Prince of Wales (later Henry V), who was shot in the face by a bow and arrow in 1403. Unlike his predecessor Richard the Lionheart, Henry survived his brush with death. The arrow missed his left eye by milimeters and almost severed his spinal-cord. Disinfection of the wound using honey, and careful surgery successfully extracted the armour-piercing arrowhead from his skull, and he went on to live for another nine years!

Title: Duke (Fem. Duchess) Alt.: Herzog (German).
Area of Rulership: Duchy
Form of Address: Your Royal Highness/Your Grace

And so, from titles of royalty, we move down to titles of aristocracy or nobility, also known as the ‘peerage’. Top of the tree is the Duke. The name of this particular title (a ‘dukedom’) comes from the Latin ‘Dux’, meaning ‘leader’. There are two types of dukes – Royal dukes, and aristocratic dukes. A royal duke is a prince (son of a sovereign ruler) who has been given an aristocratic title, usually upon marriage (eg. Duke of Cambridge, for Prince William). Despite this, they retain their royal form of address as ‘Your Royal Highness’.

Slightly below this is the aristocratic duke. Traditionally, dukedoms (indeed, all aristocratic titles) were given as rewards for exceptional military or civil service. One of the most famous examples of this is Arthur Wellesley – the Duke of Wellington. Dukedoms are awarded so rarely that in Britain, they’re almost dying out!

Title: Marquess (Fem. Marchioness). Alt.: Marquis (French), Margrave (German).
Area of Rulership: Marquisite or March.
Form of Address: My Lord

In the world of aristocratic titles, the marquess, or marquis (pronounced “Marr-key”) is possibly one of the least-known. Let’s face it, there aren’t exactly a lot of them around. A marquess was originally the title given to someone who ruled over a borderland between two countries, and the land they ruled was known as a march or marquisite. Possibly the most famous marquis known to people in modern times are the Marquis de Sade…after whom the sexual practice of ‘Sadism’ is named…and Gilbert du Motier – the Marquis de Lafayette, of American Revolutionary fame.

Born into a noble French family, the Marquis de Lafayette traveled to America in the late 1700s looking for adventure and got far more than he bargained for! Although he had absolutely NO military experience at the time, he found himself a natural leader and commander, and was instrumental in winning or helping to win, many crucial battles in the American Revolutionary War. Upon return to France, after the war, the marquis was arrested and imprisoned during the French Revolution when he tried to flee into the Netherlands. Members of his extended family were either arrested and imprisoned, or lost their heads to Madame La Guillotine.

Although he was nominally an American citizen, the American ambassador (based in The Hague) was unable to secure his release from prison. This was later achieved through the intervention of Napoleon Bonaparte who had the Lafayette family struck off a list of enemies of the state and all surviving members (including the Marquis, his son, daughters, wife and other relatives) were eventually all released from prison.

In 1824, the marquis was invited to the United States by the American government, and he came as an official guest of President Monroe, to participate in celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the American republic.

Title: Earl
Area of Rulership: Shire
Form of Address: My Lord

Apart from dukes, earls are the highest level of aristocracy that most people are familiar with. Lord Grantham in the Downton Abbey series, is the Earl of Grantham. As with sovereign princes, dukedoms, and marquesses, earldoms are hereditary through the male line, going to the first surviving son of the title-holder (or if no sons survive or were born in the first place, then to the next male-line inheritor, typically a brother or cousin).

Title: Count (Fem. Countess). Alt.: Comte (French), Graf (German).
Area of Rulership: County
Form of Address: My Lord

The title of ‘count’ isn’t that common in British nobility, but it is very common on the Continent. Countries as diverse as France, Poland, Germany and many others, have long held traditions of including the title of ‘Count’ in their aristocratic heirarchy. A count traditionally ruled over a ‘county’.

In modern society, the most famous count, is, of course, the Transylvanian vampire-nobleman, Count Dracula! Dracula is based on the ancient Wallachian prince, Vlad Dracul, also known as “Vlad the Impaler”…and that isn’t some cutesy nickname given to him by his lovers, either, but rather for how he tortured and killed his hundreds of enemies – by impaling them on wooden stakes and leaving them to die.

Title: Viscount (Fem. Viscountess)
Area of Rulership: N/A
Form of Address: My Lord

“You have to think about your style! What’s that village where your father was curate?”
“Upper Burnham Trenton”
“No, no. Give me another place, nearby”.
“Havisham, two miles away?”
“That’ll do very nicely. Viscount Bellamy of Havisham. Has style!…wouldn’t mind it myself!”

“Upstairs, Downstairs”

Unless you’ve ever watched that exchange between Lord Bellamy and Sir Geoffrey Dillon in the classic 1970s TV show “Upstairs, Downstairs”, most people in everyday life have probably never heard of the title of viscount (pronounced ‘vy-count’). The most famous viscount familiar to the majority of people today is probably Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, the Viscount Nelson, who earned his titles (as well as an amputated arm, leg, and the loss of an eye) during his gallant naval actions at the turn of the 19th century.

Upon being informed that Nelson had been hit by a sharpshooter’s bullet during the famous Battle of Cape Trafalgar, King George III is claimed to have said that “we have lost more than we have gained”. The bullet that killed Admiral Nelson, extracted from his corpse after his death, is a museum-exhibit today.

Title: Baron (Fem. Baroness) Alt.: Freiherr (German), translating as “Free Lord”.
Area of Rulership: Barony
Form of Address: Sir

The lowest of the hereditary titles (ie – a title which can be passed down, father to son), Baron was originally given to warriors or knights as a reward for exceptional military service to their king. In recognition of this gallantry, the title of Baron (which entitles the holder to be addressed as ‘Sir…’), was typically hereditary in nature.

A lot of baronies were granted to knights who had served William I (The Conqueror) with distinction in the 1060s and 1070s. 150 years later, it would be most of these barons who attempted to check the power of the unpopular King John, by forcing him to sign the Magna Carta Cive Libertatum – the Great Charter of Liberties.

A slightly lesser title below that of Baron is that of Baronet (in German ‘Ritter’, or ‘Hereditary Knight’). Like most of these titles, a baronetcy is also a hereditary title and like a baron, a baronet is also titled as ‘Sir’.

Baronetcies are among the most common titles given to fictional characters (one look at Wikipedia’s list on the subject would convince anybody of this!), probably because they’re uncomplicated, but still sound stylish. The murdered Sir Charles, and his nephew and heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, in Sherlock Holmes’ “Hound of the Baskervilles” adventure, are both baronets.

Title: Knight
Area of Rulership: N/A
Form of Address: Sir

Like kings and princes, knights have also been heavily mythologised. While the whole trope of the ‘knight in shining armour’ certainly existed, that’s about all that was really true of medieval knights. Most knights did not follow the code of Chivalry and most knights were not what we’d think of as being gallant, honourable warriors doing deeds of daring do, to win the love of maidens fair!

In actuality, most knights barely followed chivalry, and when they did, they only followed the parts that were convenient to them, when it was convenient for them to follow them. That said, being a knight did involve heavy training. To be deserving of the title of ‘Sir Knight’, you had to undergo a grueling fifteen-year training period starting from the age of seven! If you showed enough prowess at blade and steed, and were suitably ballsy enough, then in your late teens or early twenties, typically between about 18-21, you might be made a knight!

The knighting ceremony typically involved the act of the liege lord or ruler laying the sword across a knight’s shoulders (something that still happens today) and then – slapping the knight in the face!…something which does NOT still happen today! Exactly what the slap was or why it died out is unknown, but it’s generally seen as an act of dominance, to make it clear to the knight who owns him and who made him a knight to begin with!

As with most titles, a ‘knight’ today is purely ceremonial, a title given as recognition for some manner of service provided, and as a token of appreciation.

A History of Aristocracy

So, now that we know what aristocratic titles are and what order they go in, where did titles like this even come from? Although such titles (and similar titles all around the world, from Japan to China, Germany, Belgium, France, Britain and countless other places) have existed for centuries, what do they actually mean?

In times past, an aristocratic title was usually given as a reward for exceptional military or civil service. Kings and Queens had a lot of land to govern over. Since it was impossible for a king to be everywhere at once (although some certainly tried!), he often passed on the more mundane, day-to-day governing jobs (collecting taxes, ensuring state security, ruling the peasantry, etc) to his various underlings. Exactly who these underlings were, depended on their history with the king. The people chosen by the king to rule a parcel of his kingdom in his name were typically close family, relatives, good friends, or lesser subjects who had impressed the king with their service. Land was given to these people, along with a title to designate their legitimacy to rule.

If nobles did a really good job at ruling their land and looking after the king or kingdom’s interests, then they could be promoted, even after achieving their peerage or title. William Canvendish, 5th Earl of Devonshire, was promoted to the position of First Duke of Devonshire in the 1690s for taking an active part in the plot to remove the exceedingly unpopular King James II from the throne of England – an event known to history as the “Glorious Revolution”, where the English Crown was basically given on a silver platter, to James’s much more popular daughter, Princess Mary, and her husband, William, Prince of Orange. They would reign, starting in 1688, as William III and Queen Mary. As they reigned as joint monarchs, the period covering their reign is known as the Reign of William AND Mary. The College of William and Mary in the Unitd States is named after them, and was founded by their permission in 1693. It is the second-oldest university in the United States (the oldest is, of course, Harvard!).

Anyway, I digress…

For helping to kick James out of England, and giving the throne to Queen Mary and King William, the new monarchs bestowed the new title of Duke of Devonshire upon the Cavendish family – a title they have held right up to the present day! The present Duke of Devonshire is the twelfth to hold the title since its creation in the 1690s!

How Do Aristocratic Titles Survive?

Aristocratic titles survive by being inherited, usually down the male line of descent. That is to say, first son to first son, first son to first son, through the ages. Should a first son not have a first son, then upon the first son’s death, the title reverts back up the line to the first son’s next male heir – usually a younger brother or cousin. Titles cannot be inherited by female members of a family, such as daughters, or wives. This complication is one of the main plot points of the period drama series ‘Downton Abbey‘, and it was even discussed in the British Parliament.

Despite attempts to pass what was called the “Lady Mary Bill” (which would allow females to inherit family title), no progress was made. So for now at least, aristocratic titles remain solely the preserve of men. If the holder of a hereditary title dies without heirs or descendants of any kind, the title becomes extinct, and dies out. To prevent this from happening, most aristocratic families always tried to have at least two sons (a practice that was colloquially known as having an ‘heir and spare’) to carry on the family title, name, and estate.

Courtesy Titles

A courtesy-title is a title given to a member of a nobleman’s family who has not earned a title of nobility or peerage in their own right. It is given, as the name suggests, out of courtesy, or politeness. In an aristocratic, noble or even royal family, the only true noble or aristocrat is the actual holder of the title. Everyone else, unless otherwise stipulated, holds what’s called a ‘courtesy title’. The wife of an earl is titled ‘Lady’ out of politeness. Their sons and daughters are titled ‘Lord’ or ‘Lady’, again out of politeness.

A good example of this is Lord Peter Wimsey, and his good man, Bunter! Strictly speaking, Lord Peter has no actual title of his own – the actual holder of the family title is his older brother Gerald, the Duke of Denver. Peter receives the courtesy title ‘Lord’, and the privilege of being addressed as ‘My Lord’, purely out of courtesy. Even Prince George, the firstborn son of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, has a courtesy-title, in essence, which he holds thanks to the permission of his great-grandmother, Elizabeth II.

The Perks of Aristocracy

Apart from a swanky title, being nobility used to come with all kinds of perks as well. Traditionally, this was in the form of land-grants. Exactly how much land you received depended on your ranking, and it was from this land that your wealth and status were expected to grow. Management of woodlands, farmlands, taxation and rent all went towards your lordly coffers. Apart from this, you were also expected to maintain law and order over your lands, as the king’s representative in the area. Collecting taxes, settling disputes, defending the king’s land from invaders or uprisings, and of course, maintaining the King’s Peace.

In times of war, nobility were expected to lead armies and command troops, but in times of peace, they would instead lavish the equivalent of millions of dollars on their private estates. This led to the creation of gigantic country houses and, just as it is now, and as it was then – the structure of the house itself, was yet another revenue stream. It was not uncommon for grand country houses to be besieged by curious commoners who were eager to look inside.

More open-minded nobility, who were held in good esteem by the public, turned this to their advantage – on days when the family was either away, or the house was not being used, the master of the house would permit upper servants such as butlers or housekeepers, to conduct tours of the house for the enjoyment of the paying public. For a small gratuity, anybody could enter the house and be shown around the rooms and chambers, where they could admire the furnishings and decorations.

At the end of the day, the takings were divided between the Master of the House, and the servant who had conducted the tour. In some houses, this practice was so common that some senior servants even wrote their own guidebooks, so that tourists could read them as they walked through the house!

Aristocracy without Royalty?

As you’ve seen, aristocratic titles and the landed estates that tend to go with them are intended to be passed down, father to son, father to son, through the generations, in some cases, for centuries! But what happens when the country that landed estate exists in suddenly ceases to be a monarchy? What happens to the aristocracy? Can they still keep the land? What happens to their titles?

It depends. In Austria, all aristocratic and royal titles have been abolished by the government. In France, you can hold onto your ancestral estate, if you can prove ownership, and can actually afford the upkeep, but you can only lay claim to an aristocratic title if you can prove that you are directly descendant from an original title-holder. Even if you can, this doesn’t confer any special privileges on you in French society, except the right to use your title if you so wish. German nobility hasn’t officially existed since the end of the First World War, although current laws do still allow former noble families to retain aristocratic honorifics, such as ‘Von’ in their surnames (the musical ‘Von Trapp’ family continues to uphold this tradition).

The Aristocracy Today

Apart from social prestige, what exactly does being aristocracy mean in the modern world?

Honestly? Not much more than that. Sadly, retaining a title of nobility is mostly done for ceremonial reasons these days. There are a few perks, like having it printed on your passport, or if you live in Britain, then being able to sit in the House of Lords, but beside that…not much. The days of grand estates are long gone. Skyrocketing maintenance costs and dwindling inheritances make them less and less appealing to own, and even if you do want to own one, and are able to get one in one manner or another, they’re so expensive that most of them are white elephants – too expensive to keep, too valuable to destroy.

One period of history that has always fascinated me are the years that stretched from the last quarter of the 19th century, through to the first decade of the 20th century, roughly ca. 1871-1914. In both the United States and in Europe, this was a period of political stability, social change, and industrial revolution that saw the creation of the much of the modern world as we might recognise it today. It was known by a number of names, both in Europe and America, but eventually, two particular titles for this period in history started to stand out above the rest.

In America, it became known as the ‘Gilded Age’. At the same time, the same period of history became known in Europe as ‘La Belle Epoque’, French for ‘The Beautiful Era’. Whichever title you might know it by, there’s little doubt that this was a period of history marked for its uniqueness and how it shaped the modern world.

In this posting, I’ll be looking at what the Gilded Age is. Where it came from, what it meant, how it came to be called this, and what sorts of changes occurred during this period to make it stand out in the long annals of history that made it what it would become.

Before the Gilded Age

The countries of Europe and the countries of North America were constantly at war in the 1700s and 1800s. Between the 1750s to the 1870s, they were engaged in everything from the French and Indian Wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Opium Wars, the Mexican-American War, the Crimean War, the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War…to name but a few! For well over a century, America, Canada, Britain, France, Germany and various other countries (Mexico, China, etc) were all engaged in conflicts of various durations and intensities.

While countless millions of lives were lost during these wars, the innovations developed or improved during these conflicts would go on to improve the lives of countless other millions in the decades to come. The electric telegraph, the railroads, steam-powered ocean-going vessels, sewing machines, repeating firearms and countless other technologies or inventions which were at their infancy at the end of the 1700s or the start of the 1800s, had, by the end of this nearly century-and-a-half of violence, proven themselves to be reliable and life-changing creations for the people who came after. It was these innovations (among others) that would make the Gilded Age possible.

The Start of the Gilded Age

Exactly when the ‘Gilded Age’ started is somewhat up for debate, depending on where you live and who you ask. In the United States and North America, the Gilded Age began in 1873, after the recovery from a postwar (U.S. Civil War) depression, during the period of Reconstruction in the Deep South. In Europe, the contemporaneous Belle Epoque began in 1871, with the ending of the Franco-Prussian War. Regardless of this small difference of a couple of years, the early 1870s saw the birth of what people hoped would be a long and prosperous period of peace, social improvement, technological advancement and political stability. It would’ve been the first time in living memory that there wouldn’t have been a major conflict somewhere on the globe.

Mass Migration

One of the most immediate impacts of the ending of hostilities was the spike in immigration. Impoverished rural Irish, still suffering from the crippling repercussions of the potato blights, Italian migrants seeking new opportunities in the New World, French and German citizens looking to leave their war-torn nations, and thousands of East-European Jews from Poland, the Baltic states and Russia, seeking to flee antisemitism and increasingly aggressive pogroms, all fled to the United States and Canada during this time. Shipping companies with faster, more powerful and larger steam-powered ocean-liners were now able to provide safer, faster and more reliable service across the Atlantic, and their bread-and-butter fare-paying passenger was the humble European immigrant, millions of whom were shipped across the ocean every year to resettle in the United States.

So many migrants packed up everything they could, and paid whatever they had, to earn tickets to the factories and mills of the United States that a very extensive immigration process was set up. Prospective migrants had to go through all kinds of tests and examinations before they could even get on a ship! Were they healthy? Did they have skills? What did they plan to do when they reached America? Who would look after them when they arrived?

While America had few immigration laws at the time, it was nonetheless in everyone’s best interests to ensure that only those who would really stand a chance in the ‘States actually got a steamer ticket – there would be a lot of hassle involved if they made it all that way and couldn’t get in! Don’t forget that a return-trip across the Atlantic took at least two weeks by steamer.

The owners of the great steamship companies and the railroad companies were eager for immigrant labour. Not only did they buy tickets and fill company coffers, they could also be potential employees, increasing the size and productivity of the company. Soon, steamship companies learned that they could get a bigger slice of the immigrant trade if they made their migrant quarters more and more appealing. White Star, for example, had very expensive third-class (‘steerage’) tickets. But while the prices were high, once paid, the money for the ticket paid for everything – passage, a bed, all the facilities on the ship open to third-class passengers, and all meals, three meals a day, every day of the week until the ship arrived in America. A small price to pay for impoverished European immigrants who in many cases, were looking for any way to escape their decrepit situations.

The Second Industrial Revolution

Another major change which contributed to the creation of the Gilded Age was something called the Second Industrial Revolution.

The first Industrial Revolution started in the late 1700s and ran through to the middle of the 1800s. This created things like steam engines, the electric telegraph, improved farming techniques, steam-powered trains and faster, larger, more reliable and safer ships. This progress was interrupted by the wars of the mid-1800s, running from the 1840s to the start of the 1870s. With the ending of hostilities and a long period of peace, the Second Industrial Revolution began.

This second revolution (also called the ‘Technological Revolution’) saw the invention of a lot of the things which we take for granted today – electric lights, the telephone, the first cars, typewriters, fountain pens, wireless telecommunications, x-rays, dry-cell batteries and countless other innovations which helped to create the modern world. Every few months, some wild and fantastical new creation was being splashed across the newspapers of the world, and for the first time in history, mankind believed that they truly were living in an age of progress and modernity, a sensation not felt in previous generations.

Riding the crest of this new wave of innovation and creation was a group of men who became known as the ‘Robber Barons’. Robber Barons were outrageously wealthy and highly influential industrialists, moguls and magnates who made (what would be today) billions of dollars and pounds by investing in, or directly operating, these new industries that would make the modern world possible.

Robber barons operated everything. Steelyards, shipyards, railroad networks, oil-refineries, locomotive and carriage workshops and countless other big-business endeavours. Their names would become the stuff of legend, names still synonymous with staggering wealth and power today – names like Vanderbilt, Frick, Carnegie, Morgan, Hearst and Rockefeller.

But who were these men? How did they get so rich? What happened to them?

The Rise of the Robber Barons

The term ‘robber baron’ was coined back in 1859 in a New York Times article, to describe the underhanded, unethical and borderline illegal business practices of unscrupulous businessmen, mostly in the United States of America. These were men who saw the chance of a lifetime, who saw that money was to be made, and who jumped on the wagon early to get themselves a good seat on this bumpy journey of unimaginable progress!

Many of these men were involved in key industries of the 1800s. Railroad networks, locomotive works, shipbuilding, import-export, and two of the biggest industries – steel and oil. Without these two – none of the others would be possible. It was oil that fired every lamp, lubricated every machine, ran every engine and heated every home. It was steel, made by the new Bessemer Converter process (which could mass produce steel by blasting molten iron with oxygen and infusing it with carbon to make higher-quality steel in larger quantities), that made the manufacturing of bridges, railroad lines, steamships, trains, cars, carriages, high-rise buildings all possible.

Prior to the industrial era, steel was rare. Anyone can find iron – you just dig it out of the ground, heat it, beat it constantly to break off the impurities, and you’re left with iron, which can then be cast or worked into a new form or object. But steel (basically iron + carbon) was not fully understood until the 1800s. The addition of carbon into the iron made this new metal, and it was a metal that was sharper, stronger, harder and more versatile. In older times, steel was so scarce that only small amounts of it could be used or even manufactured, but with the discovery of how to make it cheaply and in vast quantities, the people who controlled this process (men such as Andrew Carnegie) – the modern world and everything that came with it – could be produced en masse!

The First Robber Barons

Three of the first big robber barons bore names which, even over a hundred years later, are still synonymous with obscene levels of wealth and gigantic business empires, the likes of which the world had never yet seen – Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Davison ‘J.D.’ Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.

Vanderbilt & Rockefeller

Starting as a simple ferry-boat owner, young Vanderbilt goes on to own one of the largest shipping fleets in the world by the 1850s. Because of this, Cornelius earns the nickname which he’s still known by today – ‘The Commodore’. With the coming of the Civil War, the Commodore realises that overland transport rather than water transport, will be the thing of the future. Eager to be in at the beginning, he sells off all his boats, ships and barges, and buys heavily into the new and rising industry of the railroad. By the late 1860s, he owns up to 40% of the United States’ railroad companies and major train-lines. He can make millions of dollars by controlling which trains go where, which bridges (which he also owns) they can use, and what cargo they carry and what freight-costs to charge. By controlling transport, Vanderbilt can control the wealth of a nation.

Including the wealth of a small, Ohio native in his late twenties – a man named John D. Rockefeller. A struggling oil-refiner who refines crude oil into the light-fuel of the day – kerosene – Rockefeller is eager to make his name in big business. When Vanderbilt, the most powerful and by far the most wealthy man in the entire country, is looking for a way to stay on top of his rivals, he and young Rockefeller strike a freight deal. To earn more money, Vanderbilt needs to move freight across the United States using his vast network of rail-lines. But to make money, he needs a type of freight that will never run out. Rockefeller needs a way to move his refined kerosene to markets in the East, but has no way of doing this.

When Vanderbilt meets Rockefeller, they strike a deal – Rockefeller will use Vanderbilt’s trains to move his kerosene to the places where he can sell it, thereby making money. In return, Vanderbilt will give Rockefeller cheaper freight-charges in return for the privilege of having a reliable commodity to fill his rail-cars which will never, ever run out. But if Rockefeller expects to get the low freight-charges that Vanderbilt promises him, then he has to deliver on his end of the deal – to ensure that the supply of oil to fill the boxcars never runs out. It’s a delicate balancing act – but if tweaked correctly – it would make both men stupidly, ridiculously, insanely and obscenely rich beyond their wildest imaginations!

Everyone needs kerosene. Everyone needs light. In the 1800s, kerosene oil fuels everything from domestic oil-lamps to the headlights on locomotives, the lamps of navigation-lights on ships at sea, and kerosene-fueled stoves for heating and cooking. By exploiting the Vanderbilt rail-network, Rockefeller can build a new company that comes to monopolise the American oil industry, bringing light and heat to every home in the land. Today, we call it ‘Standard Oil’.

It was deals like these and schemes like these, brokered between the ambitious businessmen of the 1860s, 70s, 80s and 90s that turned once struggling business-owners into gigantic, multimillion-dollar tycoons who could buy and sell the world! By feeding off of each other, they could rebound their ideas and wealth from tycoon to tycoon, mogul to magnate, back and forth, each person earning a profit at every turn and growing richer and richer by the day!

As Rockefeller, propelled by Vanderbilt, grows richer and more influential, he seeks to expand his monopoly even further. Vanderbilt might own a lot of track and rolling-stock, but by the 1870s, Rockefeller is producing so much oil that Vanderbilt can’t actually keep up. To expand his market, Rockefeller looks to Vanderbilt’s biggest rival to make a deal – a man named Thomas Scott.

The Rise of Andrew Carnegie

Thomas Scott is the president of the impressive Pennsylvania Railroad, the only company powerful enough to rival Vanderbilt in size. If Scott (and Rockefeller) wish to be bigger than Vanderbilt, then they know they need each other. To make more money from freight charges, and challenge the power of the House of Vanderbilt, Scott needs the oil that Rockefeller can give him. To reach more customers and make enough money to buy out his competitors, Rockefeller needs the railroad network that Scott controls. At a meeting between Scott and Rockefeller, the young oil tycoon meets another man who’s name would go down in history for the ages, a young Scottish immigrant named Andrew Carnegie.

You might just have heard of him.

There’s a building in New York City named after him, although its name escapes me now.

The man who would go on to become one of the biggest steel tycoons in the world, Carnegie in the 1870s is an ambitious young man trying to reach the top. He wants to be like Rockefeller…so naturally, he had to meet him, just like how Rockefeller had to meet Vanderbilt to build his fortune. As Scott’s personal assistant, Carnegie accompanies his boss to this historical showdown, and the two men who would become the controllers of the two biggest industries in the United States would finally meet. The three biggest industrialists of the Gilded Age had now all shaken each others’ hands and looked into each others eyes – and what they saw was profit!

With the deal made between Rockefeller and the Pennsylvania Railroad, which Carnegie eventually becomes a manager in, there’s enormous pressure for Carnegie to expand the railroad network. The deal hinges on the agreement that Rockefeller will provide Carnegie with business if Carnegie can provide Rockefeller with transport for his product, with both men profiting along the way. For the most part, this is fine – except for one area.

The Mississippi River.

The main north-south river in the United States slices the country in half. Rail is fast, rail is cheap, rail is reliable. But rail doesn’t float on water. This would mean that for every town west of the Mississippi looking to distribute and buy Standard Oil brand kerosene for their homes, businesses and families, they have to stop the trains at the border…offload the cargo…load it onto ferries…float the oil across the river…and then load it back onto trains and then deliver the oil to the West coast. This is expensive, and slow. And that’s just one train! Imagine doing it for dozens every day! What they needed was a bridge.

The problem was that the Mississippi River is HUGE. To span such a distance, a bridge would need to be gigantic. That’s alright, they can build gigantic bridges – this is the age of industry, don’t forget. But the problem is that in order to build that big, the bridge would need a lot of supports to hold it up. Brick or masonry is heavy and can’t hold itself up. Iron is too brittle and would crack under the weight of the trains going along the top, to say nothing of the foot-traffic and carriage-traffic on top of that. And the bridge – if there is a bridge – can’t have a load of supports underneath propping it up. The more supports or ‘piers’ there are holding up the bridge, the less space there is in the river for water-traffic. Remember those famous Mississippi paddle-steamers? They need to use the river too, you know!

To build a bridge that would be strong enough and which could span the river with as few riverbed piers as possible, Andrew Carnegie decides to use a new product – Steel.

Prior to the industrial age, steel was rare. Making it was slow and imprecise and very expensive. Steel is created when iron is fused with carbon. This creates a new metal which is stronger than iron would be on its own. The problem is, to get the iron and carbon to fuse together, you need it to be extremely hot – thousands of degrees, so that you can burn off impurities and have as clean, pure an iron as possible to combine with the carbon. The more impurities in the iron, the weaker it becomes.

Carnegie meets with an Englishman named Henry Bessemer. Bessemer has been experimenting with a new method for trying to mass produce steel. By blasting oxygen through a specially-made furnace, he can raise the temperature of molten steel to insane levels, burning off the impurities and infusing the carbon into the iron, creating steel.

Lots of steel!

This new device is called a Bessemer Converter, and it is the machine that will make the mass-production of steel possible for the first time in history.

With this new process in place, Carnegie is able to pump out loads of steel. It can be made into cylinders, I-beams, nuts, bolts and rivets and anything else that he could possibly need to build a bridge. His bridge! The first bridge ever to be built of steel!

The Eads Bridge across the Mississippi – the first all-steel bridge in the world, built by Andrew Carnegie. Seen here under construction in 1870. It still stands today.

Although it goes over budget and way past deadline, the bridge is eventually finished and opened in 1874. Since no bridge has ever been built of steel before, the public doesn’t trust it. As a publicity stunt, Carnegie takes advantage of a popular superstition of the day – that elephants will not cross dangerous bridges. What does he do? He goes out and finds himself an elephant! On opening day, he sends it across the bridge. Convinced that the structure is strong enough, the citizenry of nearby St Louis, who have turned out to witness this new wonder-bridge for themselves – cross along with it.

The success of what became known as the Eads Bridge made Carnegie’s name as a steel tycoon. Soon, steel is used for all kinds of things – bridges, yes – but steel is also used to replace the older wrought-iron train-tracks, used to replace locomotive bodies, used to build buildings, used for all kinds of applications that previously used cast or wrought iron. In the same way that Rockefeller establishes the simply-named ‘Standard Oil’, Carnegie goes on to establish his own company – the Carnegie Steel Company. Later, it will be bought out by J.P. Morgan, and be known simply as U.S. Steel. By this time, Carnegie himself was so staggeringly rich that he didn’t need his steel company anymore, and was happy to sell it off and live the quiet life, devoting himself to other pursuits – more about that, later.

How did the Robber Barons Get So Rich?

The reason why robber barons became so obscenely, ridiculously rich was because they lived at a time in history when there were very few laws regulating business and trade. There were no laws against watering down stocks, no laws against enormous business trusts, no laws against strike-breaking, no unions, no laws against factory conditions, working conditions, minimum wages, occupational health and safety, and all the other things which we take for granted today as being part of ordinary working life.

Because of this lack of legislation, there was an enormous amount of freedom to be had in doing business. You could basically do anything you wanted to make as much as you wanted, and if the competition got screwed as a result – tough! They weren’t willing to do what it took and they paid the price. Too bad, sugar-cakes! The big moguls could, and did, do whatever they could think of to stay ahead of the pack, to stay above the crowd and to not only keep their heads above water – but to find themselves a boat and laze away on the top of the ocean of humanity.

A Brave New World

The combination of big business, cheap labour, new inventions, questionable business practices, going big or going home, and lots of shady, back-room dealing, was what made the Gilded Age possible. A new age of progress, business, money, social change and optimism to replace decades of warfare, uncertainty and strife.

But why is it called the ‘Gilded Age’?

Actually, the term comes from a book.

This book:

“The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today”, from 1873

While you may have never heard of the book, you’ve probably heard of the author – Samuel Clemens!

…No? Seriously?

OK.

That’s probably because he’s better known by his pen-name: Mark Twain.

Twain wrote the book in the early 1873 along with neighbour and friend, Charles Dudley Warner. The book was the result of a challenge put forward to both men by their wives one evening while sharing dinner together. The result of this challenge was a novel that satirised the corrupt and questionable business practices of the post-Civil-War era, as well as highlighting the struggles of the common man during the same period. The title ‘the Gilded Age’ referred to the decorative process known as ‘gilding’ (today we’d probably call the same process ‘gold-plating’).

What is ‘Gilding’?

Gilding, or to use an older term – fire-gilding – is the process of plating a base metal (usually brass or bronze, but at times, also silver) with a layer of gold, using the chemical reaction that occurs when gold and an extremely poisonous substance – mercury – are combined. Applying this toxic mixture to the base metal and then applying a high amount of heat causes the gold – with the aid of the mercury – to fuse to the base metal, coating and plating it all over. It makes the finished object (a clock, a set of candleholders, an oil lamp, a silver cup, etc), look like it’s made of gold, when the actual structure is made of a cheaper metal. It makes the item look flashier and more desirable and exciting than it otherwise might be.

The same thing applied to the United States in the 1870s, 80s and 90s. The success and the wealth, the patronage and the products and services created and provided by the robber barons gave the United States the outward appearance of prosperity, wealth, and opportunity. The land where fortunes could be made and where silver-shod horses pulled carriages along streets paved of gold! But, just like with gilding a thin layer of gold over a base metal of brass, all this prosperity and progress was all a bit of a facade.

Yes, the wealth and power and money and prestige and everything else that went along with it were certainly real – just like how the gold is real – but the apparent wealth and prosperity – just like the gold – hid a much darker secret locked beneath.

The Social Problems of the Gilded Age

For all the money, wealth, power and influence wielded by men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick, Vanderbilt, Ford, Morgan and countless others, they represented the top 1% of the world. The super-rich industrialist who had built himself from the ground up and created an empire.

Propping up these captains of industry were the thousands – millions, even – of ordinary working men, women, and even children – who toiled day and night in railyards, shipyards, steel foundries, oil-refineries, offices, factories and docks. Many of these labourers and workers, pen-pushers and clerks, were ordinary American citizens. In the late 1800s though, more and more of the American workforce started being made up of immigrant labourers, chiefly the Irish, Italians, German, Polish and Russian Jews, and the Chinese. From the 1870s, they flood into America, thousands every week delivered by fast, large and reliable steamships. But just as there’s a huge surge of manpower…suddenly, there isn’t any work.

The 1850s and 1860s was the big railroad boom, both in America and in Britain and Europe. Rail-lines are built so far and so fast that there’s little consideration for what or how they’ll be used. Or even if they’ll be used at all! The result is loads of main lines, thousands of branch-lines, and tens of thousands of stations, all employing people – firemen, engineers, station-masters, porters, carriage-stewards and countless others – in jobs which suddenly don’t need them! There’s no need for people to run a railroad if there’s no people to use the railroad to begin with!

This contributes towards what became known as the ‘Long Depression’ starting in the 1870s. Even big tycoons like Carnegie and the Vanderbilts struggle. With nobody using the rails, there’s no money to be made from them. With no money to be made, there’s nobody building new rail-lines and therefore no market for Carnegie’s steel. Only Rockefeller, the man who lights up America, is still in business. But despite this, thousands of migrants arrive every week and they need jobs, and they need houses.

And that’s where Carnegie gets an idea. Instead of using steel to make rails for trains, he will use his steel to make girders and cross-braces, I-beams and rivets for structural scaffolding and framing. In his attempts to become the biggest steel tycoon in America, if not the world, he employs thousands of men, directly or indirectly, either in all the steel-plants he buys out, or by manufacturing the steel that goes onto provide employment for construction workers building office-buildings, department stores and apartment-blocks that would replace the small, cramped brick and timber shops, offices and tenement-blocks that were the mainstay of pre-Civil-War America.

Changing from railroads to construction saves the Carnegie Steel Company and makes Carnegie a wealthy, wealthy man. Rich enough to start buying up other steelworks and factories. Soon, he is the second-richest man in America…just short of a certain J.D. Rockefeller. To try and beat Rockefeller, Carnegie instructs the chairman of his board, Henry C. Frick, to ramp up production on his biggest mill, the Homestead Mill, in Pennsylvania. It’s a decision that Carnegie would come to regret.

As migrants and Americans alike seek employment, the robber barons clamp down, both on their workers and on competition. To outdo each other, the barons will do anything to stay ahead of the game. In Pennsylvania, H.C. Frick, the chairman of the board at Carnegie Steel, slashes the wages of working men in half, while doubling the working hours, instituting twelve-hour shifts. For months, the long hours, low wages, brutal treatment, accidents, injuries, and eventually, even deaths, drive the men to the edge. They strike.

To break the strike and get the mill running again, Frick hires the Pinkertons – a mercenary army that did all kinds of dirty work…for a fee, of course. Since their establishment in 1850, they’d done everything from intelligence work, detective-work, foiled assassination attempts, and even acted as presidential bodyguards. Now, Frick hires them to bust the strikers. In July, 1892, the Pinkertons march on the Homestead Mill. When negotiations break down, the Pinkertons open fire on the unarmed mill-workers, killing sixteen men and wounding nearly two dozen others. When the strike is over, thousands of men are sacked, and those which remain return to work…again, on half-wages.

The Homestead Strike explodes across the United States. Newspapers from coast to coast and around the world print stories of hardworking, defenseless labourers being mown down by paid henchmen. Frick becomes so unpopular that there’s even an assassination attempt on his life – shot twice in the head at his office at Carnegie Steel, Frick survives, but for Carnegie, the writing is on the wall. Deciding that Frick’s heavy-handed tactics are a liability, both to himself personally, and to his business-empire, Carnegie fires Frick in disgust.

Slum Clearance

The overcrowding in major American, British and European cities in the late 1800s, caused by mass migration, both to America and Britain, had become a hot topic. Buildings were so overcrowded that entire families are crammed into single rooms, sharing beds and sleeping in shifts. Aging sewer systems couldn’t cope with the influx of humanity, and the old buildings in which they lived were unsafe, crumbling fire-traps.

In England, Prince Albert, the Prince-Consort, backs philanthropic organisations to clear slums and replace them with compact but comfortable apartment-blocks as early as the 1840s and 50s. In America, a man named Jacob Riis will shock the genteel classes with the realities of the lives of the people who work for them.

Starting in the 1880s, Riis, an immigrant himself, who has successfully worked his way up from ground-level, uses the latest in photographic technology to shock the middle and upper-classes into realising that not everybody has it so good. With his assistant, Riis travels through the slums of New York City. With a camera and flash-stand, he’s able to take photos of the dark, dingy tenements without the need for any extra light. Flash photography in the 1880s is newfangled and dangerous – flash-powder is highly combustible – but the images that it produces enable Riis to capture will horrify a nation.

One of Riis’ most famous photographs.

Riis collects his images over the course of years, and tries to get newspapers and magazines to publish them, to reveal the social injustices of the day. Refusing to confront the reality of slum-life and fearing that their reputations will be tarnished if they publish such images,  most major publications decline to print his photographs.

Instead, he puts on slideshow presentations for curious New Yorkers. In time, the photographs he takes will be complied into a book – “How the Other Half Lives“. Riis creates a new branch of public information. Today, we call it ‘investigative journalism’…in the 1880s, they call it ‘muckraking’ – sifting through the filth and grime, scraping back the golden sheen of the ‘Gilded Age’ to reveal the tarnished and unsightly brass, the horrors and inequities hidden underneath. Soon, muckraking journalists are uncovering all kinds of other scandals, from food adulteration to unsafe working conditions, exploitation and organised crime! A new era of fierce, probing investigative journalism will force the world to sit up and take notice of what for so long, they had tried to ignore.

What Riis starts creates massive social reform. Slums are torn down, or renovated. Companies like Carnegie Steel, eager to be seen as the good guys, help to build new apartment-blocks, new houses, new transit networks and new office-blocks. Carnegie and Rockefeller, for years, rivals fighting it out between steel and oil, start instead to try and fight it out to be seen as the most philanthropic.

The End of the Gay Nineties

By the end of the 1890s – popularly known as the ‘Gay Nineties’ – as in being joyous and full of gaiety – the world enters a whole new century. As 1901 dawns, all kinds of new inventions are improving lives everywhere. Railroad networks, steamships, telephones, the telegraph, the radio, recorded music, phonographs, automobiles, elevators, the first high-rise apartment-blocks and ‘skyscraper’ buildings are all on the rise.

And to get it all to work smoothly, electricity is the wonder-word of the new century. To have electric lights, electric telephones, electric heaters, even electric automobiles – is to prove that you’ve made it!

This is the high-point of the glamorous Gilded Age. Stylish Art Nouveau mansions are raised, elegant Victorian mansions are updated for the new century, wired, plumbed, piped and fitted out for electricity, hot running water, gas stoves and the latest in household conveniences.

Photographed here at the turn of the 20th century, Biltmore is one of the Vanderbilt Family’s gigantic Victorian-era mega-mansions, still owned by the Vanderbilts today.

The rich and famous swan across the globe in style, floating across the seas in elegant ocean-liners, or else being chauffeured around the world in gleaming, brass-fixtured motor-cars with gasoline engines, acetylene headlamps, and plush leather seats and brocaded fabric interiors…very swish!

This new age also sees changes in working conditions. Car-companies like Dodge, Ford, Rolls Royce and countless others become leaders not only of automotive innovation and styling, but also of workplace relations, with higher wages, shorter working-hours, proper shift-work conditions, and laws to protect workers’ rights. The days of robber-barons forcing their men to work for 12 or even 14 hours at a time on minimal wage are on the way out.

The New Century

Despite all the changes and advances, in everything from communications, transport, social welfare and working conditions, the American Gilded Age, and the European Belle Epoque could not last forever. The early 20th century was the last great huzzah of this kind of super, ultra-opulent living. The age of country house shooting-parties, of masters and servants, of super-crazy-rich giga-billionaires who could congratulate each other day in and day out, of being the masters of the universe.

A number of events in the early 20th century rocked the world. In 1904, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition – better known as the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 – showcased the latest and greatest technologies to a paying public. In 1903, the Wright Brothers showed that manned, powered, controlled flight was possible!

San Francisco after the great earthquake in 1906. The city’s world-famous cable-streetcar network was badly affected.

In 1906, the Great Quake hits San Francisco, ripping apart what once had been the glittering jewel of the Pacific coast. The city of the Golden Gate would never be the same again. Elegant wooden townhouses, flamboyant Victorian gold-rush-era mansions, and the city’s famous cable-hauled streetcar network were all torn to pieces by the earthquake and then razed to the ground by the fire which followed.

The sinking of the Titanic, in April 1912 was the biggest event of the early 20th century, though. In one fell swoop, 1,500 people died in the space of two and a half hours, news that rocked the world.

The End of the Gilded Age

But if one event can truly be said to have killed off, or at least fatally wounded the Gilded Age, then that would have to be the Great War, in 1914. The bloodshed, death and carnage of the ‘war to end all wars’ stunned the world into silence and it would never be the same again. Following shortly after this came the devastating 1918-1919 Spanish Influenza Pandemic, which killed tens, even hundreds of millions all over the world. Combined, these two horrifying events forever cast a pall over the early 20th century and the glory days of the Gay Nineties. The postwar world of the 1920s was different and changed beyond recognition, and with it, the Gilded Age faded into the history books.

As the Gilded Age started to falter in the early 1900s, the two richest men in the world – John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie – both of them now aging tycoons in their 70s and 80s, started another rivalry. Not over land, or steel, railroads, oil, electrical power or how many more billions they could produce – but a rivalry over philanthropy!

To found, fund or support libraries, universities, schools, concert-halls, hospitals, orphanages, and to be seen to founding, funding and supporting, these two men give away to charitable and philanthropic causes, what would be in modern times – joint fortunes of tens, even hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars – sums of money so gigantic that they’d be on the verge of being incalculable.

All across the United States, libraries dedicated to Carnegie are thrown up in gleaming stone and glass. On the other hand, Rockefeller funds as many grand public works projects as he can possibly think of, to atone for the often more than questionable ways through which he earned his billions. To this day, Carnegie Hall in New York City remains one of the biggest  symbols of philanthropy and high culture in the United States.

In 1919, Andrew Carnegie dies at the age of 83. Driven to do some real, lasting good for mankind through his gigantic fortune, and fighting to do anything to counter the growing list of black marks against the Carnegie name ever since the disaster of the Homestead Strike, he decides to lead by example and shame his fellow multi-millionaires and billionaires into a life of righteous philanthropy. At his death, he leaves humanity with these famous words:

“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced”
– Andrew Carnegie.

But in the end, as with everything else, even in this race, Rockefeller will come out on top. Funding medical research, education, poor-relief and countless other noble causes, Rockefeller was trying to make good on one of the most famous quotes he had ever uttered – that it was his aim to earn $100,000, and to live to the age of 100 years. And he was determined, in his advancing years, to use what little time he had left, to sign away as much of his fortune for the good of mankind as he possibly could.

While Rockefeller surpassed his first goal of $100,000 by leaps and bounds, he missed out on his second goal of living to 100, by just a handful of years, dying in 1937, at the age of 97.

J.D. Rockefeller, painted in 1917, 20 years before his death.

At the time of his death, John D Rockefeller was the richest man in America, the richest person of modern times, and by some calculations, the richest person in the history of recorded civilisation. Even today’s multi-billionaires would struggle to attain the mindblowing levels of wealth that Rockefeller had earned in his whirlwind of a lifetime.

Want to Know More?

There’s lots of amazing documentaries out there which touch on this period in history, but it was a struggle to find one which dealt specifically with the Gilded Age. For information about the famous Robber-Barons like Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Rockefeller, I can recommend the TV miniseries “The Men Who Built America”.