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How to Clean Mechanical Typewriter Keys

 

I recently purchased an Underwood Standard Portable four-bank mechanical typewriter, from the mid-1920s. It’s a beautiful machine…

Ain’t it purdy?

…which is everything a classic, vintage typewriter ought to be. White glass keys, black steel body, a delightful little bell at the back which goes ‘Ding!’ and all the rest of it. But it frustrated me that the typewriter’s KEYS would stick and jam constantly.

Now in all fairness, I purchased this machine KNOWING that the keys would stick. But I was prepared to take the risk and buy it anyway. I might not get another chance to find a nice machine like this. But having bought it, I needed to get the keys working.

Do you have an old mechanical typewriter like this, with sticking keys? This is what you do to clean them up and stop them from jamming and sticking…

You Will Need…

1). Bottle of METHYLATED SPIRITS. Preferably a large one.

N.B.: Methylated Spirits is called different things in different places. In America, it’s ‘Denatured Alcohol’.

2). A soft brush. Like a small paintbrush. Not a toothbrush, that’s too stiff.

3). A small bowl or cup. This is to decant the meths into, during cleaning.

4). A roll of paper-towels.

5). Patience. Care. Attentiveness.

Preparing the Machine

To start unjamming the sticking keys, you need to rip off about 3-4 sheets of paper-towel. Fold them up along the perforations so that you have a nice, thick square of paper. Lift up the machine and shove the paper underneath. If your typewriter is an open-bottom machine like mine, that’s all you have to do.

If it’s a closed-bottom machine (for example, the Royal No. 10 desktop typewriter), then you must remove the bottom first (just unscrew it).

Having placed the wadding of paper underneath, fill your little bowl or cup, with meths. Fill it UP. You might be here for a long time.

Remove the ribbon from the typewriter. If you’re not already familiar with it, then double-check how the ribbon is installed into the machine FIRST, before you remove it.

Roll two or three sheets of regular A4 paper into the typewriter. This is to act as padding against the constant pounding of the keys against the platen and roller.

If your machine has one, open or take off the dust-cover that covers the type-basket.

You are now ready to start cleaning.

Cleaning the Type-Basket

Assuming that the machine is NOT damaged, and there are no bent hammers, broken linkages or other defects, but the machine’s keys still jam and stick, your next step is to clean the machine. Specifically, you want to focus on the type-basket. The type-basket is that big, smiley face in front of your keyboard.

A typewriter works in the following way:

You press on a key. The key depresses, and it pulls on a lever. That lever is attached to a typebar. When the lever drops, it pulls the typebar up with force, and the head of the bar strikes the ribbon, imprinting ink onto the paper. Releasing the key causes the typebar to gravity-drop back into place, resetting it for the next strike.

Jamming is caused by gunk and debris (dust, white-out crumbs, lint, etc) which gets into the fine, inaccessible areas of the typewriter-basket. This debris creates friction which stops the typebars from working naturally, through gravity and mechanical force, as they should.

This is what you’re trying to remove from the machine. It’s done in the following manner:

1). Dip your brush into the cup or bowl of methylated spirits. Remove it, and shake off any excess meths.

2). Brush the meths into the ends of the typebars, right at the back of the basket, into all the little grooves where the typebars attach to their key-levers. Brush from side to side, along the ‘smile’, and also, up and down in short strokes, to force the methylated spirits and the brush-bristles, between the grooves and gaps of the typebars.

3). Repeat this. Over. And over. And over. And over. Just keep brushing and probing, scrubbing, brushing, and probing and washing and flushing.

— — — —

What happens is that the methylated spirits dissolves the gunk stuck to the type-bars. It then just drips out of the bottom of the machine and collects on the paper-towels below. Any excess spirits just evaporates into the air, leaving a clean, and dry typing mechanism behind.

— — — —

Keep brushing and cleaning and flushing like this. Every few minutes, press the offending keys, along with all the others, to check for jamming, or improvement of function. This process can take a few minutes, or it can take days. If you want proof that the methylated spirits is cleaning your machine, then simply lift up the typewriter. You will have to change the paper-towels underneath the machine throughout the cleaning process, as they eventually become saturated with spirits and require replacing.

In removing the sheets of paper-towels, take note of their condition. A really dirty, jammed up machine will be dribbling oodles of black, grey dust and crud onto the paper, and you’ll be able to see it really really clearly. It’ll look almost like fireplace soot. This is the rubbish you’re trying to get out of your machine.

You must repeat this process until the paper removed from under the typewriter is COMPLETELY CLEAN and has NO debris on it AT ALL. This is the sign that it has all been flushed out and that the mechanism is cleaned and ready for proper use.

To give your typewriter a fighting chance, you might also want to clean under the machine at all the points where the typewriter-keys connect with the type-bars. Removing as much dust and crud as you can will ensure that the machine runs as best as possible. You can do this by brushing methylated spirits along the linkage-points, and then carefully wiping them clean with paper-towels or tissues. You may have to do this several times as well.

How long does it take to clean a typewriter? It really depends on its age, when it was last used, when it was last cleaned, how it’s been treated, its size and how thorough your cleaning is. It could take half an hour. It could take two hours. For me, I was cleaning it, on and off, for half a day, letting the meths soak through the machine to do its job, coming back, adding more, and changing the paper periodically to check the progress.

Important Note

As tempting as it may be, do NOT USE OIL on your TYPEWRITER. EVER.

As every person who repairs typewriters will probably tell you, and as all the period instruction-manuals (including my own) will also tell you, oil is a typewriter’s worst enemy. Do not use WD-40, olive-oil, melted butter, pig’s fat, sewing-machine oil or lard, in the hopes of getting your machine running.

Oil will lubricate the machine, yes. But it will also become a dust-trap as particles settle on the oil (which just sits there, it doesn’t evaporate and dry up) and create a disgusting sludge over time, that will…you guessed it…jam the machine. And you’re back to Square One.

Using meths is the ONLY way to clean your machine, as methylated spirits will just evaporate once the job is done, and leave no residue behind which dust can cling to.

If you MUST have lubricant (which is unlikely, as the whole machine should work on gravity alone), then make sure it is one that is non-greasy, and which does NOT attract dust. Otherwise, you’re in strife.

Is it Really That Easy?

Yes! Following this process, I successfully unjammed about a half-dozen keys in the typewriter that you see up above. It’s a messy, slow, sometimes frustrating method, but it does work. Otherwise I wouldn’t share it on my blog. Hopefully, it will work for you as well!

Happy typing!

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“Atticus” the Underwood Standard Portable Typewriter

 

Recently, I snatched a gem off the internet for a pretty penny. It’s no sparkling ring, but a diamond in the rough. A beautiful piece of mechanical art. What is it?

Here it is:

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, for your delectation and delight, is an Underwood Standard Portable typewriter. From what I’ve managed to find out, it dates to 1926 (Serial No. 4B220153. If anyone can be more accurate with the dating, it’s appreciated; leave a comment under the posting).

What’s with the Typewriter?

What? Don’t look at me like that…they’re cool…

I’ve always admired typewriters. I dunno why. I just do. I guess it’s because I learned to touch-type on a typewriter (albeit an electronic Canon TypeStar…look it up on Google Images and behold it in all its horrific 1980s glory)  and I liked the fact that I could see everything happening in front of me, being transferred in neat rows to a sheet of cloudy white paper.

I love mechanical typewriters. Partially for their style and elegance, their functionality, their durability, but also because they’re so much fun to use. To see everything happen mechanically as a pure extension of your hand.

About the Underwood and a Look at Portable Typewriters

Prior to the 1920s, typewriters were MASSIVE, heavy, bone-crushing monsters. Huge, solid steel typing machines that could weigh anywhere from 30-50 pounds. These typewriters were solid, dependable, and great…so long as you weren’t planning on going anywhere in a hurry.

The problem with desktop or ‘Office’ typewriters, as they were called, was that their huge bulk and massive weights (the lightest I’ve found is probably the Royal No. 10, which weighs in at about 30-odd pounds, and it goes UP from there!) is that they’re a real pain to carry around. But then, they’re not designed to be. They’re supposed to sit in your office and not move. That’s why they’re called office typewriters.

But there was a market out there for a portable typewriter. The problem was trying to find a way to make a portable typewriter so that it functioned practically.

The first ever portable typewriter was the Remington Portable, (yes, names back then were simple, plain, and to-the-point) which came out in 1921. Here it is:

The Remington Portable was considered a typing revolution. For the first time ever, you had a typewriter that you could carry around in a case, just like a briefcase! The Remington was lightweight (comparatively speaking), stylish, easy to use, and featured…most…of the features of a comparable desktop typewriter. Just as how Remington was the first company to mass-produce the modern typewriter back in the 1870s, in the 1920s, just fifty years later, it’s spearheading the design-race in getting the first portable typewriter onto the market.

At once, a typewriter-race was started. Other companies wanted to try and make portables too! And they would find fault with the Remington by pointing out that with THAT typewriter…you had to push the type-bar lever to raise the typebars up before you could type! An unnecessary, and wasteful one second! Other companies could do SO MUCH BETTER!!!

One of the companies that thought it could, was the Underwood Typewriter Co. Originally producing ribbons and paper for Remington, Underwood started making typewriters at the close of the Victorian era. Its most successful desktop model was the Underwood No. 5. An enormous machine (don’t believe me? Go find a picture) that could knock down a brick wall. Wanting to produce smaller, portable typewriters, Underwood introduced its three-bank typewriter in the 1920s.

The three-bank portable was cute and handy, but for portability, it sacrificed keys and features to make the machine small enough to fit into a briefcase. For example, there was no dedicated row for numbers. If you wanted that, you had to hit the shift-key and hit the corresponding top-row key to get a number out.

To try and rectify these shortcomings, in 1926, Underwood introduced the Underwood Standard Portable (now with new, improved, four-bank keyboard!).

At the same time, Remington introduced the Portable Model 2, which still relied on the type-bar raising lever to function properly, something that the new, four-bank Underwood portable didn’t need!

Guess which machine suddenly became wildly popular as a result?

The Underwood Portable of 1926 became one of the best-selling typewriters ever! It didn’t stop manufacture for twenty years (except for a brief period in the 1940s. Don’tcha know there’s a war on?). Other companies such as Smith-Corona and Royal also produced stylish portables, and Remington produced some sleek models in the 1930s, but the Underwood Portable remained popular because it was the first ‘complete’ portable typewriter that didn’t rely on little tricks, levers and gimmicks to do what a full-size machine could accomplish.

Intricacies of the Underwood

Despite its obvious benefits, the Underwood Standard Portable was much like a lot of vintage typewriters, in that it still made certain shortcuts here and there.

Just like every other typewriter of the period, there is no ‘1’ key. To type the digit, you press the uppercase ‘I’, or lowercase ‘l’.

Along with no ‘1’, there is also no ‘0’. A capital ‘O’ was considered sufficient for this purpose.

There is also no exclamation-mark; another thing unique to vintage machines. To type that, you hit the ‘, then backspace, and type a full-stop underneath. The two symbols combined, produce a ‘!’.

Similarly, there is no dollar-sign; ‘$’. To produce that, you type ‘S’, backspace over it, and type ‘I’ or ‘l’ over the top. The result is not as elegant, but it does work.

Shortcomings such as this were common to almost every typewriter up until the 1960s (a notable exception is the Imperial Model 50 from the 1920s, a desktop model with a full range of numerals on its keyboard, from 1-0). Where-ever shortcuts could be taken to reduce weight and size, without also impacting on quality and function, shortcuts would be taken!

One of the selling-points to me about this machine is that it has traditional, round glass-and-steel typewriter keys, a staple of pre-war mechanicals. After WWII, the design was considered antiquated and keys made of plastic became all the rage. But the old glass ones remain highly popular. But they are getting harder, and harder to find, on account of key-choppers who saw off old typewriter keys to use them in making steampunk computer-keyboards. They look vaguely interesting, but for every nice computer keyboard, there’s now a worthless, useless antique typewriter lying around somewhere. If keys must be taken, better that they be harvested from a typewriter that’s completely broken up and trashed, rather than from a working antique…like mine!

The machine features a ribbon-reverser, and adjustable right, and left margins, a carriage-release, and a left margin-clear switch (found that out purely by trial and error! Originally I thought it was a tabulation key!). It also has a TINY little switch on the left-hand side, which is the line-spacer, for Single, Double, and even Triple-Spacing! The ribbon-reverser, and the up-down ribbon-selector are two really nifty features. They allowed you to type in both red and black, and wind the ribbon onto either side of the machine. But if you’re using an all-black ribbon (as you can see in the photos), it allows you to get twice as much use out of the ribbon than you usually would, because you can type all the way along one direction, on the bottom half of the ribbon. Then all the way back, on the top half, simply by switching the ribbon-reverser, and ribbon-selector, to opposite sides of their respective settings. A real money-saver!

The typewriter also features, rather bizarrely, perhaps, a backspace key! No, it doesn’t delete letters from your paper…it’s used to reverse over your typed work to either cross it out (which in the day, was literally done by typing ‘X’ repeatedly over mistaken words), or to restrike letters that had come out faint on the paper during the first run past, and make them darker and more legible. This happens more often than you might think…

Finding Bits and Pieces

There is a resurgence in a lot of vintage things in recent years. Wet shaving, fountain pens, vintage clothing, sewing-machines, cars, instruments…and typewriters are no different.

One thing that holds people back from buying or using a typewriter is that they don’t know where to find typewriter ribbons.

There are still companies that manufacture old-style typewriter ribbons. One of them is the European pen-manufacturer, PELIKAN. Most typewriters (unless it’s a really weird one!) use a standard, 1/2-inch typewriter ribbon, that any place selling typewriter supplies WILL have.

Brands such as Underwood, Royal, Remington, Smith-Corona/L.C. Smith, Olympia, Olivetti, and so-forth, will generally all use 1/2-inch ribbons. Sometimes, you can be really lucky, and your local stationer’s shop will still stock them (or if they don’t, they can easily order them in for you). But you can also buy them online from typewriter repairers. They’re also extremely easy to find on eBay for just a few dollars each.

If the spools that the new ribbons come in do not fit into your typewriter, you can fix that simply by winding the fresh ribbon onto your existing spools and threading it through the ribbon-grooves on the typewriter. It’s a bit messy, but it works!

You should NOT use oil on typewriters. Not even really thin machine-oil, like for sewing-machines. This is because the lingering moisture of the oil will act as a dust-trap for any particles in the air. And dust will jam up the typewriter in ways that will anger and frustrate you.

Instead, you should use methylated spirits to flush out any gunk in the typewriter. The spirits will wash away (sometimes with encouragement from a brush, and gentle scrubbing) the gunk stuck to the typewriter keys, the typebars and so-forth, and then simply evaporate, leaving no residue that might cause problems later on.

Using a Typewriter

In this age of computers, iPads and text-messaging, using a typewriter to write is like using a horse and cart to go on a road-trip. It’s just so anachronistic!

But, that’s what makes it fun.

Typewriters have their place in modern society, and not just as pretty paperweights and conversation-pieces. They’re handy as the ULTIMATE laptop-computer. No power-cords, no electricity, no fading batteries, no viruses, nothing like that at all. All you need is paper, a fresh ribbon and you can literally type anywhere on earth, for as long as you have those two things. No laptop can boast of that, no matter how good its battery-life is.

Typewriters are handy for short jobs. Letters, one-off reports, lists, etc. It’s faster than writing, and you can just crank in the paper, type it out, crank out the paper and you’re done. No checking to see if the printer’s hooked up right, or if the paper’s aligned properly so that it doesn’t jam…and in our world of natural disasters, a typewriter is your best friend when the power goes out.

Here’s one last shot of the typewriter:

Why is it called ‘Atticus’?

It’s called ‘Atticus’ because in a stroke of sentimentality, I named it after Atticus Finch, the lawyer in Harper Lee’s famous novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird”. In ‘Mockingbird’, the character of the local newspaper reporter is named…’Mr. Underwood’.

That, and ‘Mockingbird’ is one of my favourite books.

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1936 Singer Model 128 V.S. manual sewing-machine

 

A Singer V.S. Model 128 Manual Sewing Machine

This beautiful pre-war gem, dating from 1936, was mine for just fifteen quid at the Camden Lock Market in London. A steal. Really a steal. It’s less than $25AUD. I don’t know many other places apart from London where you can find such nice deals on vintage sewing-machines, or on vintage and antique anythings, really. Certainly I’ve never seen such a deal happen in Australia. Not unless you’re supremely lucky.

The Singer Model 28-series was a Vibrating Shuttle (Abbrev.: “V.S.”) machine. The Vibrating Shuttle mechanism was essentially the second generation of sewing-machine mechanisms, and was one-up on the earlier and less effective Transverse Shuttle (“T.S.”) sewing-machines. This posting will look into the various features of this machine, such as they are…

What Was the Model 28?

The Model 28 and its variants (128, 28k, 27, etc, etc, etc) was one of Singer’s most popular domestic sewing-machines. Mechanically simple and easy to use, the Model 28 was capable of producing neater stitches at a faster and more consistent rate. Because of this, it was manufactured all the way from the 1880s up into the 1930s.

What is a Vibrating Shuttle?

Early lock-stitch sewing-machines operated by using a long, barbell-shaped bobbin inside of a small, shiny, bullet-shaped thing…called a shuttle. How the shuttle (and hence, the bobbin) interacted with the machine determined the model-name.

Transverse (“T.S.”) Shuttle machines worked by having the needle punch through the cloth and pull up. The cloth moved back and the shuttle traversed (moved across) the bed of the sewing-machine, behind the needle-plate, underneath the machine, from left to right. The sharp point or nose of the shuttle (the bullet-shaped end) went through the loop of thread made by the needle, and pulled the bobbin thread through after it. Then, the shuttle slid back across the machine, from right to left, a second before the take-up-lever pulled the stitch tight and the feed-dogs shoved the cloth along, ready for the next stitch. A machine typical of the T.S. system is the Singer Model 12 “Fiddleback” from the mid-1800s:

The photo of this beautiful Singer 12 comes from ISMACS, the International Sewing MAchine Collector’s Society

This is ingenious, but at the same time, inefficient. To improve efficiency, the V.S. was created.

Exactly why it’s called a “Vibrating” shuttle is a mystery…not only to me, but it seems…to every other person who’s written about this subject, who’s writing I’ve read. It doesn’t vibrate at all! It swings!

The V.S. swings back and forth to make each stitch. The shuttle with its bobbin inside, sits in a small carriage that moves back and forth in a semi-circular motion, with each forward motion catching the loop of thread and pulling the bobbin-thread through it, and every backwards motion pulling the stitch tight.

If anyone ever asks you how a sewing-machine works, I think the best working example you could find is a V.S.

An Examination of Crank-Machines

As you may notice on this machine, it’s crank-operated…

This machine dates from 1936, by which time, the first generation electric sewing-machines had entered into the market. Why then, does it have a crank?

Singer produced manual, crank-operated sewing-machines for a hundred years, believe it or not. They were still making brand-new crank-machines as recently as the 1950s! Why you might ask, would a sewing-machine produced in an era of radio, electric lights, talking pictures, record-players and 1st-generation telvisions, still be made with a crank?

A number of reasons.

– Unreliable power-supply.

It wasn’t until the mid-1930s in Britain that there was a unified, nationwide electrical power-grid. Prior to about 1935, every town and city in England had their own separate power-stations, producing different voltages of electricity. What might be enough to power a radio or a light in one town or county, might be too much in another, or too little somewhere else. With this lack of uniformity, it wasn’t possible, or practical, to produce one electronic machine for the whole nation to use, since it would have to be adapted and altered to suit every single separate power-grid in the U.K.

So to overcome this, machines were made to be as independent of the power-grid as possible. This wasn’t just sewing-machines, but other things – typewriters, radios (which ran on batteries), and even stoves (which would run on gas, instead of electric hotplates).

– Spare Parts

In a way, Singer (as with many other products of the day) were victims of their own success. As anyone else who tinkers with these things will surely testify to, a vintage sewing-machine is built to be indestructible. Nothing short of a nuclear explosion will even put a dent into these machines. And because of this, the old cranks on machines, as well as the machines themselves, rarely broke down. As a result, any spare parts (such as cranks) which were produced, were not often sold to already-existing machines. So to prevent wastage, they simply went on making crank-machines.

– Rationing

This machine was built just three years before the outbreak of the Second World War. When the war started, and Singer’s factory in Scotland wasn’t able to produce any more modern sewing-machines with electric motors, they reverted back to the older, more reliable and less grid-dependent crank-machines. They were easier to build, and if the power went out thanks to a German air-raid, you could keep on sewing. And sewing was important during the war – with few clothes and fabric being strictly rationed for the war-effort, housewives, dressmakers and tailors had to be incredibly skilled with a sewing-machine to make every swatch of cloth count and not waste anything.

– Portability

The crank-driven sewing-machine is the ultimate portable sewing-machine. Treadle sewing-machines are strictly stationery objects. Electric machines can only go as far as the cord will allow you. But a crank-operated Singer can be taken literally anywhere, and still work flawlessly, without being reliant on anything other than the strength of the operator’s right arm (to turn the handle!)

On the famous ghost ship, the Mary Celeste, an posting about which, may be found on this blog, the captain’s wife, Mrs. Briggs, brought her sewing-machine with her when she joined her husband on his latest voyage. It was almost certainly a hand-cranked model, a treadle-machine being too bulky and heavy to carry onboard a sailing-ship. Most likely, it was a Singer 12, the most common model of the time (the Mary Celeste set sail in 1872, the Model 12 came out in 1865).

A Look at the Mechanics

Hand-crank machines worked very simply. They operated no differently from comparable treadle, or even electric machines. It was just a different method of doing the same job.

If you’ve ever looked at the side of an old sewing-machine, you may notice a hole underneath the balance-wheel. This hole is where the crank-assembly is bolted onto the machine (or in later models, where the sewing-motor is bolted on). The crank works by the arm of the crank fitting between the spokes of the balance-wheel (if your machine has a solid balance-wheel, then you can change it to a spoked one if you want it to be a manual machine) and turning the wheel.

The cogwheels on the crank-assembly work in a ratio of 1:3. One turn of the crank-handle turns the big wheel one revolution.

One revolution of the big wheel produces three revolutions of the small one.

Three turns of the small wheel turns the arm three times, which turns the balance wheel three times (and therefore, produces three stitches).

Given the size of the machines and how compact everything had to be, it’s not a bad power-ratio.

Hand-crank machines such as this one were popular for their compactness, ease of use and their portability. The tradeoff was that you had to use more muscle-power to run the machine, but on the other hand, you could take this places that your treadle, or even your electric machine, could never go.

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Infernal Luck – The Sinking of the S.S. Athenia

 

Prologue

On the last day of September, 1938, British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew into Heston Aerodrome, alighted from his aircraft and proclaimed to the crowd around him, that thanks to the Munich Agreement signed with Herr Hitler, he had secured “peace for our time!”

Less than a year later, the world would be plunged further and further into the greatest military conflict ever seen in the history of mankind.

The Sinking of the S.S. Athenia

This posting looks at one of the most infamous, and yet possibly, one of the most forgettable war crimes of the Second World War. Within hours of war being declared, a passenger-liner with over a thousand lives onboard was torpedoed and sunk. It sparked fury and outrage, condemnation and denial throughout the world, and spurred Europe on into the bloody contest of war for the second time in a generation.

The Background

On the 1st of September, 1939, the German Army invaded Polish territory, claiming that the Poles had attacked guard-posts along the German-Polish border. The world held its breath to see what would happen next. For forty-eight hours, the Wehrmacht and the Wojsko Polskie, the German and Polish armies respectively, duked it out on the borderlands.

It was by no means certain that the Polish would lose, or that the Germans might win. Poland had fought, and won, a war against Russia back in the 1920s, so Polish confidence in their armed forces was not without foundation.

For two and a half days, the world held its breath, keeping tuned into the wireless, their eyes on newspaper-headlines, their ears out for the postman’s whistle or the knock of the telegraph-boy, wondering whether or not France and Britain would honor their alliances with Poland to come to her aid if she was ever under attack.

The Athenia Sets Sail – September 1st, 1939

12:05pm. The S.S. Athenia steams towards her dock at Glasgow, Scotland, ready to start taking on passengers. Onboard already are the crew, and some early-boarding passengers.

The S.S. Athenia is a British steamship; a passenger-carrying vessel that plied the transatlantic trade for the Anchor-Donaldson Line, running regular services between two halves of the great British Empire! The United Kingdom at one end, and the Dominion of Canada at the other. It did regular service between Liverpool or Glasgow, in England and Scotland, to Quebec, or Montreal in Canada.

The Athenia is a modest ship – nowhere near the size, or grandeur of the great floating palaces of the world – She cannot compete with the world-famous ocean-liners such as the Aquitania, the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, or the Normandie, pride of the French Line. She doesn’t have the old-world charm of the Olympic or the Berengaria, but she will get you to where you want to go in comfort and style. Her weight is a mere 13,580 tons, compared to a heavyweight such as the Titanic, tipping the scales at over 46,000!

The rumblings of war have been in the paper for weeks. Months, even. Fears of a second Great War had been in the air ever since the German annexation of Austria in 1938.

Some people see war as being inevitable. Others think that 1939 will close as a year of peace. Either way, she leaves Glasgow, Scotland, for Montreal in Canada on the 1st of September. She carries 1,418 passengers and crew.

The S.S. Athenia, Montreal Harbour, Canada; 1935

Passengers on the Athenia range from the moderately famous, to regular families, to single persons heading to the United States and Canada; returning from holidays, from business-journeys, or escaping from the potential powder-keg of Europe before it gets too late.

10:00pm – The Athenia takes on the last of her passengers at Glasgow. She weighs anchor and sets a course for the English port city of Liverpool.

As the ship pulls away from the dock at Belfast, dock-workers scream at the passengers on the deck that they’re cowards, for running away from a war, instead of staying to stand and fight with the rest of them. As yet, no formal declaration of war exists between Britain and Germany. The Athenia sails off into a peaceful Irish Sea.

September 2nd, 1939

3:30pm. The Athenia departs from Liverpool, England. She is bound for the open ocean. She will not stop until she reaches the Canadian port of Montreal.

7:30pm. Under advisement that a state of war is soon likely to exist between Britain and Germany, the ship’s master, Capt. James Cook, orders a blackout onboard, to protect against possible U-boat attacks. All the curtains are drawn. All the portholes are shut, the navigation-lights, mast-lights, port and starboard navigation-lamps and wheelhouse lights are all shut off. Passengers are not even allowed to smoke on deck, in case the glows of their cigarettes should give away the ship’s presence.

On the ship, the war seems far away and distant. But the crew is already taking precautions. Apart from the blackout, the ship now sails up the western Irish coast. It must stay close to land to deter submarines, which can only maneuver effectively in deeper waters.

September 3rd, 1939

3:40am. Having altered her course for safety reasons, the Athenia now sails away from Ireland and out into the open sea. She is heading across the Atlantic Ocean for Canada. As she sails off into deeper waters, there is the ever-present danger of German U-boats. U-boats have been patrolling these waters for several days now, in preparation for the official declaration of war.

Seeking to protect his ship, Capt. Cook adopts traditional wartime tactics against u-boats. The ship sails as fast as it can (15kt), and maintains a zig-zag course, steaming forwards always, but at the same time, changing her heading every couple of minutes. First a few degrees port, then starboard, then port, then starboard again. This is to prevent any submarines from getting an accurate fix on her, and therefore, hinder a u-boat’s ability to fire an accurate shot at her hull.

The Athenia is only doing what any other ship in the British merchant navy would do. But she is hampered in this by her speed and size. Big ships such as the Queen Mary can move much faster, and are less of a target to u-boats as a result, despite their much larger sizes. The Athenia may be smaller, but her slower speed makes her more vulnerable to attack.

While protected by treaties and conventions, the crew of the Athenia don’t expect the Germans to play nice. Although legally, the Germans cannot attack the Athenia due to her status as a noncombatant vessel, Capt. Cook and his men take no chances.

Unknown to Cook and his crew, the one man who is actually on their side is Adolf Hitler himself. Hitler sees the British, as a great and powerful nation of intelligent, white, Aryan people, as brothers and friends of the German people. He is eager to find a peaceful and diplomatic solution to the problem of war.

So as not to antagonise the British, he orders the u-boats of the German Navy to adhere tightly to the 1936 Prize Regulations. The Regulations are a series of rules (to which Germany was a signatory) which lay out the kinds of ships which may, and may not be sunk during maritime warfare.

Unarmed merchant ships, such as the Athenia, could not be sunk without just cause. If a German u-boat found such a ship, it was obliged to make its presence known. The ship in question was expected to heave-to (stop dead in the water). German sailors were then allowed to search the ship for illegal contraband (such as munitions or firearms).

If no such contraband was found, the ship was to be allowed to continue on its way. If contraband was found, the ship could be sunk. But only AFTER the crew and passengers had been offloaded into lifeboats.

A ship clearly marked as an armed merchant-ship, or a ship of the Royal Navy, could be fired upon without a u-boat making its presence known first.

11:00am. The Athenia is steaming towards Canada. The seas are heavy and rough. This hampers the Athenia’s speed and her ability to maintain an effective anti-submarine, zig-zag course.

11:15am. In the Athenia’s wireless-room, 2nd Radio Officer, Donald McRae, picks up a signal. It’s a radio-broadcast from the tiny island of Valentia, off the west coast of Ireland.

It is nothing less than Neville Chamberlain’s famous speech that informs the entire world that “consequently, this country is at war with Germany”.

The message is hardly unexpected. But it’s a bit of a shock, anyway. McRae makes sure that the entire ship knows the news before very many more minutes have elapsed.

The official declaration of war by Britain means that as of this time onwards, the Athenia is sailing through wartime waters. German submarines will be on the lookout for ships that are of importance to the British war-effort, and if they find them, they will sink them.

The Athenia is safe, however. As an unarmed passenger-ship without the facilities for being converted to an armed merchant-cruiser, troopship or munitions-transport, she is protected by international treaties. A ship such as the Athenia, which does not, and which is unable to contribute to the British war-effort, is an illegal target in marine warfare. This should prevent her from being sunk by German submarines or battleships.

12:00 NOON. Capt. Cook orders a notice to be drawn up. It is to inform the passengers of what has happened back in Europe. Under no circumstances are the officers onboard to cause undue panic or alarm. They are instructed to reassure passengers and tell them that the current activities onboard the ship are precautionary, and for their own safety.

1:00pm. The ship’s lifeboats are uncovered and prepared for an emergency. Two boats are swung out on their davits. Should there be an real emergency, these two may be lowered and loaded with passengers at once. It will give the ship a head-start in rescuing survivors, and provide the crew with valuable minutes with which to evacuate the passengers.

2:00pm. Fritz-Julius Lemp is 26 years old. He is commander of the German U-boat, U-30. Already at sea, he receives orders to proceed to his assigned patrol-area in the Atlantic Ocean. Germany is at war with Great Britain.

7:00pm. The Athenia is steaming full-ahead towards Canada. With U-boats about and war declared, she doesn’t want to linger in hostile waters for any longer than she has to. She is moving at top speed steering a wartime course, with her lights doused. But unknown to her crew, Capt. Lemp of U-30 has already spotted her.

Lemp orders the submarine to dive. He tails the ship, spying at her through his periscope. He finds the ship’s behavior odd. It is moving at top speed, it is steering a zig-zag course and has all its lights off to prevent detection. Lemp is well aware that Hitler does not want civilian shipping destroyed. But this ship is acting like an armed merchant-ship, or even a battleship of the Royal Navy!

Onboard the Athenia, Capt. Cook is taking NO chances. He well remembers the unrestricted submarine warfare of the 1910s and how great ships such as the Lusitania were torpedoed and sunk for no other reason than that they could be. Although he shouldn’t have to do so in this war, Capt. Cook adopts all the traditional tactics for eluding submarines. He lived through an era of unrestricted submarine warfare and knows what might happen to his ship.

7:30pm. Capt. Cook, confident in the security and safety of his ship, joins the first class passengers for dinner. The Athenia continues to steam westwards, zigzagging all the way.

7:38pm. Capt. Lemp on U-30 is finally satisfied that the ship he has been tailing is a British armed cruiser or a military vessel of some description, and therefore a legitimate target of war under the terms of international treaties and regulations. He orders the submarine to fire two torpedoes.

7:39pm. The Athenia is rocked as something slams into the side of the ship! The whole ship is rocked by the impact and the electrical power goes out, plunging the entire vessel into darkness! Crew on deck spot the disappearing periscope of a submarine, confirming that it is indeed a torpedo-strike.

7:40pm. The first torpedo has hit the Athenia square-on and blown a hole in her side. The other torpedoes have missed, or have not fired at all due to malfunctions in the torpedo-tubes.

7:45pm. 1st R/O Don is ordered to send out an immediate distress-message, in case another torpedo knocks out the Athenia’s power-supply altogether. He sends out a coded distress-message, but also sends out a message in plain English. Automatically, an electronic cry for help is sparked off across the airwaves…

“ATHENIA TORPEDOED – 5/42 NORTH, 14/5 WEST”

At once, the ship receives welcome news. Norwegian cargo-ship, the Knute Nelson, just 40 miles away, has received her loud and clear. The Nelson’s radio-operator appears to be in shock. He telegraphs back to the Athenia:

“THE OLD MAN* DOESN’T BELIEVE YOU’VE BEEN TORPEDOED, BUT HE’S COMING TO YOUR ASSISTANCE ANYWAY”

(*’Old Man’ is the ship’s captain).

One of the ships that receives the SOS call is the German ship the S.S. Bremen. Unsurprisingly, it ignores the radio-message and continues to its destination, the Russian port of Murmansk.

8:15pm. The Athenia has been sinking for a little over half an hour, settling heavily by the stern. The submarine, U-30, has surfaced to watch the effects of the torpedo. Radio-officer Georg Hoegel intercepts the Athenia’s plain English radio-transmission. He is shocked by what he hears. He writes it down and hands it to Capt. Lemp. Lemp too, is horrified and guilt-ridden by what he reads. Instead of torpedoing a prize of war, he has attacked and sunk an unarmed civilian passenger-ship, carrying women and children! He swears his crew to silence and secrecy. They will not speak of this to anyone, ever. Lemp feels so horrible about what he has done that he refuses even to enter it into the logbook.

The distress-messages sent out by the Athenia echo around the Atlantic Ocean. Allied shipping receive the calls, and telegraph the unspeakable information to the Admiralty in London.

9:15pm. The Athenia is in no immediate danger. She is sinking, but the damage is limited and there is time to spare. For the 1,400-odd people onboard, the Athenia is amply equipped with 26 lifeboats. All those not killed in the torpedo-attack are offloaded onto the boats and lowered into the water. By now, there are only two lifeboats left. Radio Officer Don continues to send out distress-messages over the radio. So far, four ships have responded and are steaming towards the disaster-site.

9:30pm. The S.S. City of Flint is an American steamship making her way across the Atlantic Ocean. It picks up the Athenia’s distress-messages and alters course towards her. The captain, navy-veteran Joseph Gainard, informs his passengers (mostly students and academics) that the unthinkable has happened – a British civilian passenger-ship has been fired upon by a German submarine, is sinking, and is in need of immediate assistance. Passengers aid the crew in preparing the ship to take on survivors as it steams towards the disaster-site.

10:00pm. With rescue just a few hours away and all surviving passengers and crew put off in the boats, Capt. Cook, and the remaining crew and officers abandon ship. Radio Officer Don sends off one last communication to the rescue ships, that their vessel is being abandoned and to come as fast as they can. Officer Don joins the captain and remaining crew in the last lifeboat, reserved for their use, and lower it into the water.

Onboard lifeboat No. 6, Sir Richard Lake, a former Canadian politician, and his wife, watch the ship sinking. As on the Titanic, passengers row the lifeboats around and into clusters and clumps, to remain secure, and to keep warm in the open air. Despite his age (Sir Richard is eighty years old!), he insists on taking an oar and helping with the movement of the boat.

10:30pm. Now that the fuss has died down, an urgent telegram is sent to the Admiralty in London. It reads:

“IMPORTANT – IMPORTANT – ADMIRAL ROSYTH INTERCEPT 2059 JAMMING NEAR SSS SSS* ATHENIA GFDM*, TORPEDOED, POSITION 54.44/14.05”

The signal “SSS” is similar to the signal “SOS”, but is specifically used by ships who were the victims of submarine-attacks. The letters “GFDM” is the Athenia’s radio callsign.

11:00pm. Onboard the last lifeboat to leave the Athenia, Capt. James Cook removes his uniform and dons civilian clothes instead, to make it appear that the captain has gone down with the ship. He knows that in the last war, German submariners would shoot the commanding officer of an enemy ship.

12:00 MIDNIGHT. Another telegram reaches the Admiralty in London, confirming that the steamship Athenia has indeed been hit by a German torpedo. The Admiralty sends out urgent radio-messages to all Royal Navy ships within broadcasting range.

September 4th, 1939.

12:05am. Royal Navy ship, H.M.S. Vanquisher receives an urgent communication:

“IMMEDIATE PROCEED TO SS ATHENIA SINKING IN POSITION 56.42 NORTH, 14.05 WEST”. 

12:56am. Royal Navy ship, H.M.S. Vivacious receives an urgent communication:

“IMMEDIATE HMS VANQUISHER PROCEEDING TO BRITISH SHIP ATHENIA SINKING IN POSITION 56.42 NORTH, 14.05 WEST. DETAIL ONE OF YOUR DIVISIONS TO ACCOMPANY HER. ACKNOWLEDGE”.

2:30pm. The impact of the torpedo-attack on the Athenia goes much further than other ships, the Royal Navy or even the Admiralty or the German Navy. In London, at the American Embassy, American Ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Patrick Kennedy…as in the father of future American president John F. Kennedy…is awoken to the news of the sinking of the Athenia. Americans are onboard the ship, and he makes it his duty to find out how many, and who they are. He sends a telegram to the State Department in Washington D.C.:

“REPORT: STEAMSHIP ATHENIA OF DONALDSON LINE TORPEDOED 200 MILES OFF MALIN HEAD WITH 1400 PASSENGERS ONBOARD. SOS RECEIVED. SHIP SINKING FAST”. 

At the same time out at sea, the first rescue-ships arrive. Passengers and crew from the Athenia are offloaded from the lifeboats onto the vessels which come to the sinking ship’s aid. The ships sail off to the town of Galway, in Ireland, the nearest land to the sinking vessel.

4:30am. The Athenia continues to sink. Despite the damage, the ingress of water is slow. She will not go under for another six hours. She will finally founder at 10:30am. More ships arrive to rescue more passengers and take them to Ireland. British naval ships have come to pick up more survivors.

The S.S. Athenia sinking; Sept. 4th, 1939

The City of Flint, one of the first ships to pick up the Athenia’s distress call, sails for Halifax, Nova Scotia, with over 400 survivors onboard.

The Impact of the Sinking

The sinking of the Athenia sent shockwaves around the world. Newspapers in Great Britain, the colonies, Australia, Canada and the United States flashed the despicable and cowardly act of the Germans, to attack an unarmed passenger-ship without warning, over their front pages in big letters, complete with photographs. Here is the New York Times for the morning of September 4th, 1939:

In Kansas, the Topeka Daily Capital flashed the following headlines:

If you haven’t spotted it yet, it’s under the heading: “BRITISH STEAMSHIP SINKS IN 18 HOURS”. 

Almost at once, the finger-pointing began. The British knew the Germans did it. The Germans knew that the Germans did it. But the Germans insisted that the British did it, as a way to discredit the honourable German Navy, which would NEVER attack an unarmed civilian ship! The truth was that the German Navy knew what had happened. By listening to English radio and reading English newspapers, and by plotting out the locations of all their u-boats, the Germans knew that it was U-30 that had done the deed.

The truth about what really happened to the Athenia did not come out until 1946, during the famous Nuremberg Trials.

The sinking of the Athenia destroyed any hopes that the Germans, or the British had, of finding a quick, peaceful and diplomatic end to what they hoped would be a false war. Instead, it horrified the British people and resolved them to despise the Germans. It shocked the Germans and dragged them into a war which they were still trying to get out of…get out of with Britain, at least. The sinking of one ship had so polarised the European community that by 1940, the whole continent was at war.

More Information?

“OUTBREAK 1939 – The World Goes to War”, by Terry Charman (Virgin Books, London, 2009).

Sinking of S.S. Athenia

The Sinking of the Athenia

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Operation Mincemeat – The Amazing Tale of ‘Billy Martin’

 

The Andalusian Coastline, Spain.

April 30th, 1943. 9:30am.

A local fisherman  walking along the surf, spots something in the waves. It’s waterlogged, soaked through, and is being steadily washed up onto the beach by the breaking waves. Once the fisherman gets close enough to the water, he recognises this bit of ‘driftwood’, as a human body.

The body is dressed in British military attire. There is a life-vest around the body, and handcuffed to its wrist, an official-looking briefcase, locked, and no-doubt, crammed full of all kinds of military intelligence!

Officially, Spain is neutral during the Second World War. But that doesn’t stop them from passing on intelligence to the Nazis when the situation suited them. And right now, it seemed to suit them very well.

The dead body of the English seaman was brought ashore and the contents of the pockets scrutinized. According to his identification papers, the corpse was that of the late Maj. William Martin, of the Royal Marines. He had apparently drowned, or frozen to death in the cold Atlantic waters and his body had been washed ashore. With a wealth of British military intelligence literally chained to his wrist.

The Germans had struck on a bonanza of information! Now, they knew that the Allies planned to invade Italy! They knew how many people there would be, how many tanks, air-planes, troops, and even where the landing-beaches would be! It was a gold-mine, a jackpot! A triumph!

…and it was all FAKE.

This is the true story of “Operation Mincemeat”, an audacious and ludicrous plan dreamt up British espionage and propaganda men in London during the middle of the Second World War. A plan to deceive the Germans so utterly that they would never know their true intentions! It was a plan that seemed insane and impossible! A plan that went off without a hitch…

What was Mincemeat?

In 1943, the tide of the Second World War is beginning to turn in the Allies’ favour. It’s turning alright, but it’s taking its sweet time about it.

To hurry things along, the Allies plan an invasion of Italy, to destroy Mussolini and the Italian fascists, and render the Italians a negligible force, and a useless ally to the Germans. Or better yet, to get the Italians to join the Allies in their struggle against German and Japanese tyranny!

But to invade Italy, the Allies need to keep the German code-breakers and spies busy and distracted, by feeding them nice, fat, juicy chunks of misinformation. Lies and deceits that would keep them guessing and uncertain, right up until the very day of the invasion!

With the North African theater of the war going so well throughout 1942, the Allies were planning their next step in the war: The invasion of Europe. To go through France was foolhardy, impossible, and stupid. For the time-being, at least, that would have to wait. But Italy, on the other hand, might be an easier, and more viable option.

Critical to the invasion of Italy was the invasion of Sicily, the island famous for its long connections to the Italian Mafia. Whoever controlled the island of Sicily would have a naval base in the region, and would therefore be able to control the rest of (or a vast majority of) the Mediterranean Sea.

The problem with invading Sicily was that the Germans knew that the English knew that invading Sicily was the wise thing to do. So to throw the Germans off the scent, the English began one of the biggest and most outlandish deception-plots in the history of the Second World War: Operation Mincemeat.

How did ‘Mincemeat’ work?

The best way to get the Germans to think that the Allies were going to invade Italy via every other possible part of the Italian coastline, apart from the island of Sicily, was to do it in writing. But obviously, para-dropping a letter over the Reichstag in Berlin wasn’t going to work. This deception had to be more dramatic than that. The British had to make the Germans think that they’d stumbled across a huge gold-mine of information, purely by chance. Something that would look like such a huge blunder to the British, and such a huge intelligence win to the Germans, that it couldn’t possibly just be a set-up, could it?

The idea for ‘Mincemeat’ was dreamed up by two men: Lt. Commander Ewen Montagu, and Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley. For those trying to untangle their tongues after that, it’s spelt: “Cholmondeley”…but is actually pronounced: “Chumley”.

Originally, Cholmondeley had suggested dropping a dead body over France with a radio-set and a busted parachute. The Germans would pick up the radio-set, and the British could transmit lies to them, live over the airwaves. This idea was shelved for being too unworkable. How would the radio-set survive a drop from an airplane which was supposed to kill a man, with a parachute that didn’t work properly? It sounded interesting, but was far too impractical. But Cholmondeley wasn’t going to give up. He was sure the idea could work…it just needed a bit of tweaking.

He’d gotten the idea for the dead-body ruse from a man who would eventually become one of the greatest writers in the history of British literature…Ian Fleming. Yes, that Ian Fleming. James Bond Ian Fleming. Fleming supposedly, got the idea from another author…strange how no idea can ever be truly considered original, is it?

Regardless of who dreamt up the idea in the first place, Cholmondeley kept it in his brain until he could figure out how he could use it effectively in the war-effort.

The problem was that planting documents on dead bodies had been used for years. It happened in the Great War, it happened twice in 1942 alone! The British were perhaps fearful that if they used this trick too often, the Germans might get wise to their schemes. So it had to be deployed with delicacy.

And the upcoming invasion of Sicily was just such an event where this scheme might work.

Preparing the Bait

For Operation Mincemeat to work, Cholmondeley and Montagu required the following ingredients:

– One dead body. Male. Average size and appearance.
– British field battle dress.
– A background and biography of the dead body.
– Delicious, juicy papers and intelligence documents that would make the Germans drool with delight.

The first step was the hardest: Finding the body.

This being the middle of WWII, you’d think that finding a dead body would be easy. Dead soldiers, sailors, airmen, civilians, government types, and so-forth, must be all over London. But not just any body would do. For the plan to work, it had to look as if the body had died by drowning or exposure. As such, the actual cause of death of the body had to be hard to detect. It couldn’t be something obvious like a heart-attack, a gunshot, a stroke, or from some sort of infectious disease.

And on top of that, they had to find the body, never mind what it died of! The days of body-snatchers were long-gone, and everything had to be done through official channels, full of white paper and red tape. The body, when found and selected, couldn’t be one after which relations or friends were likely to come calling. There had to be no next-of-kin wondering what happened to Uncle Bertie or Cousin Jonathan, there had to be no living relations, no friends, no family, nothing whatever. The body had to be completely unattached.

As tricky as this was, they did eventually find a body.

To aid the duo in their scheme, they enlisted the help of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, a renowned pathologist. He explained how a body decomposes, and what kinds of traces various manners of death leave behind. This allowed Montagu and Cholmondeley to narrow their field of search.

The body that they finally selected was that of Glyndwr Michael. Mr. Michael, a Welshman, was a derelict, a drifter, a homeless illiterate and a man with a sad past. His father had committed suicide, and his mother was dead. He had, so far as the research uncovered, no living relations. And he’d committed suicide by swallowing rat-poison. His body had been found in the streets in London and taken to the mortuary. Because evidence of the poison was miniscule, post mortem, it was almost impossible to tell what the man had died of. So he could have died of almost anything!…

…such as drowning at sea.

Mr. Michael was perfect! The body was bought and paid for, and the plan was in action!

You Only Die Twice

The body was found. It was suitable in every respect. Size, weight, age, gender, manner of death and general overall appearance. Now, it had to be kitted out as a dead naval officer.

To do this, Mr. Michael was renamed Major William Martin, Royal Marines. And to enforce this falsehood to anyone who dared to ask, a library of phoney documents were run off the printing-press to certify this.

The body was outfitted with standard brown British Battle-Dress. An actual naval uniform was considered too hard to obtain in wartime…they were all handmade by Gieves and Hawkes of Savile Row! They wanted to give the fictitious ‘Maj. Martin’ a sendoff to support his king and country, but they didn’t want the funeral to be that expensive!

Besides, could you imagine asking a Savile Row tailor to measure up a corpse for a naval dress-uniform? He’d probably kick you out of his shop.

With the attire sorted, now came the documentation.

‘Maj. Martin’ was given I.D. papers that said he was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1907. His surname was ‘Martin’ because it seemed to be a really common surname in the Royal Marines in the 1940s, a convenient coincidence. Nobody was likely to ask questions.

Along with stuff like a wallet with his I.D. cards in it, his pockets were stuffed with everything from train-tickets, theater-stubs, love-letters from his phoney fiancee, a receipt from an exclusive London jeweler for an engagement-ring that cost and arm, a leg and his right nut, a photograph of his fiancee (in reality, a photograph of an office-secretary, who posed for the shot), bank-papers, cards, business-letters, money…even a letter from the London tailor Gieves and Hawkes…Not to say that his naval dress-uniform was ready, but to say that they were waiting for payment for a shirt he’d supposedly asked them to make for him!

With the personal papers complete, it was now necessary to prepare the false military documents. Among other things, letters and maps were planted inside the official briefcase. These papers would ensure that the Germans thought the British would invade Greece before invading Italy. This was fake, of course. It was a ruse to get the Germans to position their troops where they would be completely useless, while the Allies invaded Sicily. All the documents were printed or typed on official War Office stationery, with all the right stamps, seals and signatures.

But it wasn’t just necessary to deceive the Germans…but the British as well! Just in case anyone who wasn’t in on the plot should come asking questions, more fake documents were prepared, to protect the mission. As Churchill said: The truth must always be protected by a bodyguard of lies. And they lied alright! Even the coroner who had secured the body for the operation typed up fake documents. He claimed that permission had been given by the corpse’s next of kin (in this case, parents) that the body might be used for military purposes.

Again, this was fake. Mr. Michael, the corpse, had no parents! They’d died years ago! But it was all part of the deception…

Preparing the Drop

The body was prepared, dresed, kitted, fitted and stuffed with papers. Now all that remained was to cast the bait into the sea, and wait for the Germans to bite.

The only problem with this was that the bait was a dead body. And bodies rot.

to combat this unsightly issue, the men in charge of ‘Mincemeat’ engaged the services of the original ‘Q’…Charles Fraser-Smith. A genius scientist, who was literally the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s ‘Q’ character in the James Bond series, Fraser-Smith devised a metal canister in which the corpse could be stored. To prevent decomposition, the canister was filled with dry ice, and then sealed shut. Dry ice is carbon-dioxide in solid form. Once the ice melted and vaporised, the entire inside of the canister would be filled with Co2, driving out the oxygen and preventing further decay of the corpse.

This canister, along with all the other necessary bits and pieces for the deception, were loaded onboard a submarine, H.M.S. Seraph. The Seraph and its crew sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Once the Seraph had reached the waters off the coast of Spain, it’s C.O., Capt. Norman Jewell, ordered the submarine to surface. The canister with the corpse inside was brought up on deck, and opened. The briefcase with the papers were shackled to its wrist and a life-jacket strapped around its torso. Now, the operation could begin.

The body was prepared for burial at sea. Capt. Jewell read out the 39th Psalm, although this wasn’t specified in his orders, and then the corpse was lowered into the sea.

To make the deception just that little bit more realistic, the crew of the Seraph even launched an inflatable life-raft, to drift off with the body. Then, they sailed off, letting the currents take the body away towards Spain. The specially-designed canister that carried the corpse was dumped into the sea and riddled with machine-gun fire to make it sink. The Seraph sent a radio message back to London to say that the mission had been a success.

After the Drop

Just dropping the corpse into the ocean and sailing off was not enough to ensure ‘Mincemeat’s success. Once the corpse was found by the Spanish and its contents were passed onto the Germans, the British carried on with their ruse. Maj. Martin’s name appeared in a list of the dead and missing, which was published in the New York Times a week later. You can read it here:

You can see Martin’s name at the bottom of the list of officers. He’s mentioned as “ROYAL MARINES. – T/Capt (A/Major) W. Martin“.

To further impress on the Germans and their Spanish collaborators the ‘importance’ of these phoney documents, the British started making inquiries about what had happened to the ficticious Maj. Martin and his precious cargo. After a while, the Spanish Government, still pretending to be ‘neutral’ during the War, sent the papers contained in the locked briefcase back to England. Although the Spanish had assured the British Government that the contents of the case had been untouched, the British could see that the Spanish and Germans had gone over the documents in minute detail, and they must’ve believed their contents, because they went to extraordinary pains to make it look like they hadn’t been tampered with, to prove how ‘uninterested’ they had been. But there were telltale signs, such as envelopes being re-sealed and papers being replaced into their packets in the incorrect order and so-forth.

The message sent to the War Office and to the United States Government, was “Mincemeat Swallowed Whole”, to indicate that the ruse had been a success.

And boy, was it ever!

The Effect and Importance of Mincemeat

Mincemeat was an intelligence success because through this deception, the Germans relocated their troops from Italy, to Greece, where the British wanted them to think the Allies would make their invasion of southern Europe. Greece was one of the last Allied strongholds in Europe to fall to the Germans, so it must’ve seen reasonable to the Germans that it would be the first place that the Allies would want to reclaim.

This relocation of troops to Greece meant that only a skeleton force was left in Sicily to defend the island. Even after the invasion of Sicily, German agents working in England, who worked with the British Government against the Nazis, in the famous Double Cross System (usually just marked as “XX”), would feed the German Government false information, saying that their ‘spying’ in Britain revealed that the invasion of Sicily was a blind, a distraction for the Germans, while the Allies prepared for their main invasion of the Greek islands.

This falsehood also paid off. The Germans, convinced that Greece was to be invaded, refused to move their troops. By the time they realised how they’d been tricked, and relocated their men to Italy, the Allies had attained a firm hold on the island of Sicily and was preparing for the big push to the Italian mainland.

Less than a year later, in September, 1943, with the Italian fascists under Benito Mussolini beginning to wane in power (and with Mussolini himself becoming increasingly unpopular in the eyes of the Italian population for failing to defend Italy and allying himself with Hitler), the Italian Royalists, under King Victor Emmanuel III, signed an armistice with the Allies, and switched sides, from Axis to Allied.

The Italian Royalists and most regular Italians, now free from the scourge of Mussolini, fought against the Germans and the remaining fascists elements in Italy. Despite allying himself with with the winning side, King Victor, a once popular and respected monarch, was suffering from increasingly waning popularity. When the Italian capital of Rome was bombed by Allied planes, his popularity took a real nosedive.

Operation Mincemeat secured several wins for the Allies and changed the course of the war in many ways…Although it did little to secure the Italian king’s popularity, and in 1946, the monarchy was abolished.

More Info?

“Operation Mincemeat” – BBC History

“Operation Mincemeat” – BBC Documentary

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Singer No. 99 Sewing Machine Manual

 

I found this at the flea-market, together with a box of about a hundred Singer machine-needles, for $5. It is an original 1930s SINGER No. 99 sewing-machine instruction-manual, which I automatically snapped up to add to my grandmother’s machine.

Here is the manual:

It’s all complete and in great condition. There’s no rips, tears, stains, missing pages or loose bits about to fall off. I know you can get scanned reprint copies off the internet for free, but they’re never as nice as having the real thing. You print those out and you have no idea how to get them bound, the pictures are horrible, the size is SO inconvenient and they’re not always *precisely* what you want, but you gotta take it because you can’t find anything else!

This little manual is conveniently sized so that it fits comfortably in your hand, and you can store it easily in the compartment underneath the machine-bed, along with the electric-motor installation manual that I bought previously:

I also bought this neat little box of machine-needles:

This box is REALLY small! It’s about 2/3 to 1/2 the size of a regular 50-a-box matchbox. But it holds something like 90 or more needles! I’ll never need to buy any more for the rest of my life!…Okay maybe a few more…

Still on the lookout for more stuff.

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Not for All The Tea in China: A History of the Opium Wars

 

If you’re like most people, the only thing you know about the Opium Wars is that they destroyed China, and that they were mentioned briefly in the film “Shanghai Knights”. These pivotal and world-changing conflicts are largely forgotten today, but they were crucial to shaping the China that we have in the 21st Century. This posting will explore what the Opium Wars were, and what their affect was on the Chinese country and its people.

China Before the Opium Wars

China before the Opium Wars was a land steeped in mystery, mythology, tradition, and a strict class-society, clinging to its traditions, its customs and its ideals which it had held for centuries before. China was for the Chinese. And no-one else.

In Chinese, the country of China is called ‘Zhongguo‘ (‘Zhong-g’awe’). Translated to English, it literally means “Central Country” or “Central Kingdom”. And herein lies the root of what led up to the Opium Wars. Here is the very reason why the opium wars got started in the first place.

To understand why the opium wars started, you need to understand Chinese foreign policy during the late Imperial period. In the 18th and 19th centuries, China was an INTENSELY isolationist country, which was inward-looking, arrogant, conceited and which believed firmly that the world almost literally revolved around it. It was, in every sense of the words, the Central Kingdom. Or so it believed.

British-Chinese Relations

Western contact with China was few and far between. Westerners were not allowed to visit China. They could try, if they wished, but they were rarely allowed in. Marco Polo was one of the few people from the Western World who ever managed to get so much as a shoe-in.

In the 1700s, the British tried to set up diplomatic relations with Imperial China. England was a proud and ancient nation with a growing empire…and so was China. It probably made sense to the British that these two great powers on opposite sides of the world should become friends.

To this end, the British sent forth a man named George Macartney. Macartney was an influential and famous man. How famous? Surely some of you may have heard the saying that the British “controlled an empire upon which the sun never sets”?

It was Macartney who coined that phrase.

Macartney and his chums arrived in the Chinese capital…then called Peking…in 1792. Here, they were admitted to the Forbidden City (a VERY rare privilege, even to the Chinese!) and granted an audience with the Emperor of China.

This historic meeting between East and West was ultimately unsuccessful. The British wanted to establish an embassy in China, so that the British and Chinese governments could be diplomatic partners. They also wanted China to open more of its ports to foreign trade. The emperor of China, the Qianlong Emperor (“Chee’yan-Long“) explained to Lord Macartney that such a relationship between China and England was not possible due to conflicting views and aims from both parties. The Emperor even wrote a letter to King George III to explain why such a relationship was impossible…although by now, George III was barking mad…so he probably never read it. But you can. Here is the letter.

It’s often believed that the emperor refused trade and diplomatic relations with England because Macartney had offended him by refusing to kowtow to him, instead stating that he would bow, or salute him as his own king, but would not execute actions which would suggest that the King of England was of lower status to that of the Emperor of China!

This is not true. But it sure makes for a hell of a story.

The Chinese Government firmly believed that it had no need for foreign goods, foreign inventions, foreign anything! It was Zhongguo! The Central Kingdom! And damn anyone else who thought otherwise! Foreigners were not even called ‘foreigners’! In most court, and government documents from the period, they are actually referred to as “barbarians”! And so, for another half-a-century, China kept itself largely locked away from the West.

For roughly 80 years, between the 1750s to the 1830s, the Chinese would only allow the British access to ONE port. This was known as the “Canton System”. So-called, because the one port that was open to foreign ships was the Port of Canton, in Canton Province. Where is Canton? It’s in southern China. You won’t find it on any map printed today, but you will find it if you search for Canton’s modern name…Guangzhou.

The Leadup to the Opium Wars

The British wanted things from China. And they were sure that the Chinese wanted things from England. The British were desperate for things like silk, spices, porcelain, and of course…its national beverage…TEA! And they could GET IT…if the Chinese agreed to trade with them, and would open up more ports to Western ships…but they refused! And they said that they wanted none of whatever the British had to offer! Western inventions and technology were of no use to the Chinese whatsoever!

This bickering between two proud and ancient countries had been going on for decades. Centuries, even. Then, the British discovered that the Chinese WERE interested in something that they could offer them!…Opium!

You have to understand that there was HIGH demand for Chinese goods in Europe. Europeans wanted porcelain, silk, spices and tea, but the Chinese didn’t want suits, top hats or flintlock muskets, watches, neckties or shoelaces, so the British had to find something else to trade with the Chinese. Something that the British could lay their hands on with ease, and which the Chinese attached some sort of value to.

The issue here was that the only thing that the Chinese would accept in return for all the goods that they were exporting to Europe was silver coinage. Or to be precise, silver tael. A tael is not a dollar or a pound, or any other type of currency. It is an Asian unit of measurement, the Chinese equivalent of the Troy Ounce. One tael of silver weighed just under 40 grams. The silver, measured by weight in tael, was paid in sycees. The ‘sycee’ (‘sigh-see’) is the traditional, boat-shaped Chinese ingot, the shape into which gold and silver were cast. These things:

A 10 tael (roughly 380g) Chinese silver sycee

Since Britain and the majority of Europe traded in GOLD, silver was hard to come by, and this caused even MORE problems. It was in trying to find a solution to this silver-drain, that the British hit on the answer…

…Opium.

Starting in the 1700s, the British began importing opium into China. Small quantities at first, but when the British gained more and more control of the Indian Subcontinent, the opium-trade boomed!

Opium was very popular in Europe. It was used for everything, from toothaches to fevers, back-aches to muscle-cramps. This drowsy, pain-killing drug was the aspirin of its day. Although effective as a painkiller, opium is also highly addictive. And it was this addictive quality that the British were counting on.

The Chinese jumped on the opium at once! Before very long, opium addiction was a huge problem in China. It was so bad that the Chinese emperor of the time ordered a nationwide ban on all but the smallest uses of opium, for medicinal purposes.

The British just ignored the Chinese government and continued sending in opium. And the Chinese commoners kept smoking it. At the turn of the 19th century, the emperor put ANOTHER ban on opium! In 1810, the Chinese Empire issued the following decree:

“Opium has a harm. Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality. Its use is prohibited by law. Now the commoner, Yang, dares to bring it into the Forbidden City. Indeed, he flouts the law! However, recently the purchasers, eaters, and consumers of opium have become numerous. Deceitful merchants buy and sell it to gain profit. The customs house at the Ch’ung-wen Gate was originally set up to supervise the collection of imports. If we confine our search for opium to the seaports, we fear the search will not be sufficiently thorough. We should also order the general commandant of the police and police- censors at the five gates to prohibit opium and to search for it at all gates. If they capture any violators, they should immediately punish them and should destroy the opium at once. As to Kwangtung and Fukien, the provinces from which opium comes, we order their viceroys, governors, and superintendents of the maritime customs to conduct a thorough search for opium, and cut off its supply. They should in no ways consider this order a dead letter and allow opium to be smuggled out!”

Strong words! And you can bet that the world sat up and took notice!

…or not.

The opium trade went right on ahead, as if NOTHING had happened!

The First Opium War (1839-1842)

In the end, everything came to a head! By the 1830s, tensions had been simmering for a century, and now, they finally exploded! The British wanted Chinese trade, and the Chinese didn’t want British opium! The Chinese wanted the British to stop importing opium, and the Chinese wanted the British to leave them alone! In 1839, the First Opium War started.

The Chinese easily outnumbered the British forces during the First Opium War, but the British had the benefit of modern, Victorian-era technology. And they had military bases very close to China: They had colonies in India, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore! The British systematically slaughtered the Chinese with their weaker, and older army, poorly-equipped to fight a modern war.

The First Opium War ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking.

The treaty took its name from the ancient Chinese city of Nanking. It was on a ship anchored in the river, the HMS Cornwallis, that the treaty was signed.

The treaty forced China to pay reparations to the British for the cost of the war, it forced the Chinese to cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain indefinitely. In 1898, the island was granted to Britain on a 99-year lease, which famously ended in 1997.

The most famous condition of the Treaty of Nanking, however, was the British forcing the Chinese to open five of its ports to British and other foreign ships! The ports were the cities of Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and most famously…Shanghai.

The British forced the Chinese to sign the Treaty of Nanking. One of the conditions to which the Chinese were forced to consent to, was that foreigners living in China were subject to the laws of their own countries, and not to the laws of the Chinese Government. This led to the establishment of the Shanghai International Settlement in 1942.

The ending of the Opium War was a huge boost to the British. The opium-trade continued, and trade flourished between China and the West. This caused British-controlled Shanghai, soon to be the International Settlement, to flourish, turning what was once a small, riverside town, into what is today, one of China’s largest and prosperous cities. British Christian missionaries pushed deep into China to spread the word of God and British influence in the Pacific increased significantly.

The end of the First Opium War brought modern technology to China, it brought prosperity, trade, new inventions and exposure to new people. But it also brought more opium, more troubles, and it greatly weakened the public perception of the Qing Dynasty. The Qing Dynasty was never very popular. It was rife with corruption and was not generally supported by the Chinese people. Its humiliating defeat at the hands of the British caused it to slip even further in the opinions of the Chinese people.

The Second Opium War (1856-1860)

The Second Opium War was a British (’56-’60) and French (’57-’60) conflict against China. The British wanted more access to China, and they wanted to continue the opium-trade…both conditions which the Chinese Government refused to grant.

Just as with the first Opium War, the British won, and just like the first one, the conflict was over in four years. The war ended with the Convention of Peking, in 1860. Signing of the convention would result in more Chinese port-cities being opened to foreign traders; most notably, the ports of Hankou, Danshui, and Nanking). On top of this, foreign countries (France, Britain, Russia and the United States) were able to send diplomats to live and work in the Chinese capital of Peking (previously a closed city, forbidden to foreigners). This led to the establishment of the Legation Quarter in Peking, which would play a key role in the Boxer Rebellion, forty years later.

On top of this, foreigners were now allowed to travel deeper and deeper into the Chinese interior (not something previously allowed) and foreign ships were able to sail freely up and down the length of the Yangtze River.

The Impact of the Opium Wars

The two Opium Wars were short, largely one-sided regional conflicts, but their impact on the history of China was great, both positive, and negative. On the negative side, it forever established the Chinese as a bunch of opium-huffing, slitty-eyed and ignorant Asian foreigners, a stereotype that lasted well into the 20th century. Over the next half a century, the other European powers would start carving up China, staking out concessions for themselves. As this famous cartoon from the late 1800s shows, China was fair game for foreign powers:

This cartoon appeared in a French magazine. Here, we have the country of China (the pie on the table) being divided up by the Foreign Powers, represented by ENGLAND (Queen Victoria, LEFT), GERMANY (the Kaiser, next to her), RUSSIA (Tsar Nicholas II), FRANCE (peering over the tsar’s shoulder) and JAPAN (represented by by the character on the right), while the Chinese Government (the pig-tailed Oriental in the background) watches on in horror as its nation is divided up.

For all the negative effects and results of the Opium Wars, they did have positive outcomes as well. Although it was dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age, China benefited from Western exposure, new technologies, better communications and trade, and entered the 20th Century increasingly casting off its old and dusty superstitions and traditions, its illogical and irrational isolationism and embraced modernity and more forward ways of government and handling its affairs. Without the Opium Wars, China would probably still be an Imperial country, with an emperor, a Forbidden City, and struggling to keep up with the rest of the world.

The changes wrought by the Western Powers on China caused the final collapse of the much-hated and increasingly weak, and corrupt Qing Dynasty, and the birth of a modern, republican China in the early 20th century, and all the things that would come with it, such as the Nationalist Era, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Civil War, and the establishment of modern China.

Want to Know More?

The Emergence of Modern China – The First Opium War

Victorianweb – The Opium Wars

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Cleaning a Singer Model 15 Treadle Sewing Machine

 

Last week, I paid a visit to a family friend. She was a retired tailor who had been sewing ever since she was a little girl. She learnt how to sew on her mother’s old Singer treadle-machine…which has since been sold out of her family.

Her friends had an old Singer treadle-machine that had been in their family for a while and which they had absolutely no use for. Not sure what else to do with it, they gave the old sewing-machine to her as a birthday present, and it now sits on a scrap piece of carpet/rug in her living-room, as a display-piece.

The machine had been through a rough old time. According to my friend, it had sat in her friend’s garage for years, untouched. It’d been rained on and dripped on and neglected and left to rot. She cleaned it up some when she had it moved into her house, just so that it wouldn’t track grime everywhere, but other than that, she’d never touched it.

When I told her I was interested in having a look at the machine, she tried to show me how it worked, but found out that she couldn’t, because the presser-foot lever was jammed in place! I told her that if she wanted, I’d be happy to fix it for her. For a really simple ‘non-functional-to-operational-condition’ quick fixer-upper, I would need pliers, machine-oil, a rag, a box of tissues, tweezers, a screwdriver, and a powerful torch. She found these things for me, and I set to work.

The handwheel spun around really nicely and the needle-bar and takeup lever and the oscillating hook and the feed-dogs were all moving perfectly; I oiled them anyway, just in case, but the foot-lever, and the foot-tension screw were completely jammed from years of neglect. Neglect and possibly, rust. It took a lot of tissue-wiping to remove all the dust, gunk, grime and crap that had built up inside the machine, and a lot of oil, and quite a bit of force with the pliers, to get the tension-knob moving up and down like it should. I kept turning it all the way one way, and then all the way the other way, up and down, to clean off the gunk inside the threads of the foot-bar, and replace the grime with oil, to make it screw up and down more smoothly.

This was my first time working on what we found out later, was a Singer Model 15. This information (along with much more!) was supplied to us when we found the original, 80-year-old manual inside one of the drawers of the machine! I wasn’t entirely sure how this machine all went together, but I figured it out in the end and found out where I had to put the oil.

By the time I’d satisfied myself that the tension-screw for the presser-foot was moving about as well as it was going to, the oil that I’d let soak into the other parts of the presser-foot bar had pretty much done its job. All I had to do was to add a drop of oil at the very top of the presser-foot bar (to let it run all the way down the sides of the shaft), and then I started working the presser-foot lever up and down several times, to spread the oil around. In the beginning, I had to apply a bit of force to the foot-bar to encourage it to move, but once the oil got into everywhere, it moved freely and comfortably with no issues.

After that, I pulled apart the rest of the machine – the clutch-wheel at the back, and so-forth, and cleaned, polished and oiled all those parts of the machine as well, before putting the whole thing back together.

This was a rather rushed, spur-of-the-moment fixup which I hadn’t intended to do when I went to visit, but which I ended up doing, anyway! All up, the job took about two hours. Of course, I could’ve done a much better and more intricate job and cleaned up the ENTIRE machine to like-new condition, but I didn’t have the time to do that. I got it running at least, and that was the main thing.

We fitted in a new needle, we threaded it up and took it for a spin. It worked perfectly!

When you’re working on these old, purely mechanical machines, with solid steel parts (such as the old treadle, hand-crank, or early electric-power machines, mostly pre-1950s), you shouldn’t be afraid to use a *bit* of extra force when encouraging the mechanism to move. Don’t try and break it (if you do that, then you’ve got some serious upper-body strength, these machines are nearly indestructible!), but at the same time, if the mechanism clearly isn’t going to move…don’t try and make it. Most likely, you just need patience, to let the oil do its job. Let it soak in for a few minutes, and then try again a little bit later.

Anyway, back to the machine…

The treadle-mechanism doesn’t work, yet. The old belt was broken and my friend hadn’t had a chance to find a new one yet. But it works fine just by turning the handwheel…by hand…and I’m pretty happy with the results. She said she’d get her husband to fit on a new belt, and then she would clean up the rest of the machine in her own time, and start using it for sewing! Yay!

Another beautiful vintage machine brought back to life and saved from the scrap-heap. And all in two hours, with stuff that you can probably find around the house, or buy at your local hardware shop.

These are just some of the photographs I took of the machine. Yes, they’re a bit blurry, but that’s cause I took them in a hurry… 

And last but not least, the serial-number…

An EC-XXX-XXX serial-number dates this machine to 1939, so pre-WWII.

by

Cleaning a Singer Model 15 Treadle Sewing Machine

 

Last week, I paid a visit to a family friend. She was a retired tailor who had been sewing ever since she was a little girl. She learnt how to sew on her mother’s old Singer treadle-machine…which has since been sold out of her family.

Her friends had an old Singer treadle-machine that had been in their family for a while and which they had absolutely no use for. Not sure what else to do with it, they gave the old sewing-machine to her as a birthday present, and it now sits on a scrap piece of carpet/rug in her living-room, as a display-piece.

The machine had been through a rough old time. According to my friend, it had sat in her friend’s garage for years, untouched. It’d been rained on and dripped on and neglected and left to rot. She cleaned it up some when she had it moved into her house, just so that it wouldn’t track grime everywhere, but other than that, she’d never touched it.

When I told her I was interested in having a look at the machine, she tried to show me how it worked, but found out that she couldn’t, because the presser-foot lever was jammed in place! I told her that if she wanted, I’d be happy to fix it for her. For a really simple ‘non-functional-to-operational-condition’ quick fixer-upper, I would need pliers, machine-oil, a rag, a box of tissues, tweezers, a screwdriver, and a powerful torch. She found these things for me, and I set to work.

The handwheel spun around really nicely and the needle-bar and takeup lever and the oscillating hook and the feed-dogs were all moving perfectly; I oiled them anyway, just in case, but the foot-lever, and the foot-tension screw were completely jammed from years of neglect. Neglect and possibly, rust. It took a lot of tissue-wiping to remove all the dust, gunk, grime and crap that had built up inside the machine, and a lot of oil, and quite a bit of force with the pliers, to get the tension-knob moving up and down like it should. I kept turning it all the way one way, and then all the way the other way, up and down, to clean off the gunk inside the threads of the foot-bar, and replace the grime with oil, to make it screw up and down more smoothly.

This was my first time working on what we found out later, was a Singer Model 15. This information (along with much more!) was supplied to us when we found the original, 80-year-old manual inside one of the drawers of the machine! I wasn’t entirely sure how this machine all went together, but I figured it out in the end and found out where I had to put the oil.

By the time I’d satisfied myself that the tension-screw for the presser-foot was moving about as well as it was going to, the oil that I’d let soak into the other parts of the presser-foot bar had pretty much done its job. All I had to do was to add a drop of oil at the very top of the presser-foot bar (to let it run all the way down the sides of the shaft), and then I started working the presser-foot lever up and down several times, to spread the oil around. In the beginning, I had to apply a bit of force to the foot-bar to encourage it to move, but once the oil got into everywhere, it moved freely and comfortably with no issues.

After that, I pulled apart the rest of the machine – the clutch-wheel at the back, and so-forth, and cleaned, polished and oiled all those parts of the machine as well, before putting the whole thing back together.

This was a rather rushed, spur-of-the-moment fixup which I hadn’t intended to do when I went to visit, but which I ended up doing, anyway! All up, the job took about two hours. Of course, I could’ve done a much better and more intricate job and cleaned up the ENTIRE machine to like-new condition, but I didn’t have the time to do that. I got it running at least, and that was the main thing.

We fitted in a new needle, we threaded it up and took it for a spin. It worked perfectly!

When you’re working on these old, purely mechanical machines, with solid steel parts (such as the old treadle, hand-crank, or early electric-power machines, mostly pre-1950s), you shouldn’t be afraid to use a *bit* of extra force when encouraging the mechanism to move. Don’t try and break it (if you do that, then you’ve got some serious upper-body strength, these machines are nearly indestructible!), but at the same time, if the mechanism clearly isn’t going to move…don’t try and make it. Most likely, you just need patience, to let the oil do its job. Let it soak in for a few minutes, and then try again a little bit later.

Anyway, back to the machine…

The treadle-mechanism doesn’t work, yet. The old belt was broken and my friend hadn’t had a chance to find a new one yet. But it works fine just by turning the handwheel…by hand…and I’m pretty happy with the results. She said she’d get her husband to fit on a new belt, and then she would clean up the rest of the machine in her own time, and start using it for sewing! Yay!

Another beautiful vintage machine brought back to life and saved from the scrap-heap. And all in two hours, with stuff that you can probably find around the house, or buy at your local hardware shop.

These are just some of the photographs I took of the machine. Yes, they’re a bit blurry, but that’s cause I took them in a hurry… 

And last but not least, the serial-number…

An EC-XXX-XXX serial-number dates this machine to 1939, so pre-WWII.