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A Sprinkling of History – Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice

 

Head into your kitchen and take a look around. If it’s anything like mine, or like any other average kitchen, it’s full of stuff like salt, pepper, cinnamon, cumin, powdered gelatin, sugar, mint, basil, onion, garlic, pork, beef, chicken, eggs, bread, butter, coffee, tea…all things we see, use, and eat on a regular, daily basis.

What today are common and popular condiments, foodstuffs and seasonings that we use every day, and which we can purchase at any time, were once expensive, hard-to-find luxury goods, available to only the richest and most prosperous of people. This posting  will outline the histories behind, and the significance of a selection of the flavorings, spices, foodstuffs and condiments found in almost every kitchen in the world today.

The History of Salt and Pepper

Any kitchen, any restaurant, any dining-table in the world, any fast-food eatery, cafe, diner and mobile food-wagon is going to have these two most important of all seasonings. Salt and pepper.

While we take these two staples for granted today; white, crunchy, tangy, musky, woody and spicy, they were once luxury goods available to only the most privileged of peoples, and available in only very small amounts. This is their history.

Salt

The importance of salt can hardly be exaggerated. It doesn’t just make food taste nice, but throughout history, salt has held a place of great significance. It was used for everything from flavoring meat, preserving food, and even as currency! A lot of expressions in the English language relate to salt and its one-time status as a rare and valuable commodity.

Today, you can buy salt from any supermarket in any number of forms. But in older times, salt was hard to come by, and incredibly expensive. Salt is acquired by one of two means, depending on which is the most effective:

The first is the simple evaporation of seawater. Gathering seawater into large, open troughs or pans and letting the water evaporate, is one of the most common ways of getting salt, even today. Once the seawater was evaporated by the sun, the salt-crystals would remain behind. Then, it was simply a matter of gathering the salt-crystals, washing them, purifying them, and repeatedly evaporating them until they were clean, clear, white and ready to use.

The second method of procuring salt was salt-mining. When vast inland lakes and seas dried up, they left large deposits of salt on the earth’s crust. Today, we know them as salt-flats. Salt in this form is known as ‘rock salt’ because it’s clumped up into large crystals. Accessing this salt is as simple as shoveling it out of the ground, mining for it, and purifying it, much like with the seawater.

But doing all this by hand, without the aid of modern mass-production, meant that for thousands of years, salt was a relative luxury. Industrial quantities of salt were used for preserving meat and fish. Food such as pork, beef, ham, bacon, and any number of sea-creatures were packed in salt to keep it fresh. The large chunks or chips of salt used in this curing and preserving process were called ‘corns’ of salt. Hence the term ‘corned beef’; literally, beef preserved by being packed in with large flakes and chips of salt.

Salt was so valuable and relatively hard to come by that as far back as the Ancient Romans, salt was used a currency. Soldiers were paid in salt, and only a man…”worth his salt“…would be allowed his allotted ration. When soldiers weren’t paid in salt, they were paid in coinage that would allow them to buy the salt which the money represented. This form of payment was known as a salarium. Working people are still paid their regular ‘salaries‘ to this day.

The relative scarcity of salt meant that it was a massive status symbol. These days, salt is sold and presented at-table in any number of ways: In cheap plastic salt-grinders or shakers, in plastic zip-lock bags and in shrink-wrapped packets inside pretty cardboard boxes. But it wasn’t always like this.

Salt was so important that once it was presented at the table, it was housed in a specially-manufactured piece of tableware: The salt-cellar.

You can still buy salt-cellars today, but antique cellars, made of glass and sterling silver were prized pieces of the household’s table-setting. The number of salt-cellars on the table showed off how wealthy the homeowner was, and the position of the cellars on the table determined and indicated a diner’s relationship to the homeowner!

A king, lord, or wealthy merchant would have closest access to the salt-cellar. The people in his immediate vicinity, and who were able to reach the salt-cellar, did so at the king’s invitation, and were said to be ‘above the salt‘. People who were less deserving, and therefore, who couldn’t gain access to the coveted salt-cellar on the table, were seated further down the table, and therefore ‘below the salt‘.

Salt was so important and prized that whole wars were fought over this simple, white crystal. Taxes were levied against salt, and restriction of prohibition of its passage through a country was even hoped to affect the outcomes of wars and battles. During the American Revolution, the British and loyalist colonials hijacked, stole or hid valuable cargoes of salt bound for the Patriots. While this may seem funny today…don’t forget that salt was required to preserve food! Without the salt, meat and fish could not be kept fresh for long journeys and big battles, which, the British hoped, would turn the tide of the war in their favour.

So important was salt that government mishandling of this precious flavouring could cause the population to turn against it in a hurry! In 1648, the Russian Government unwisely put a heavy tax on salt. Taxation in Russia was easily circumvented, and many people of relative means were able to get away with not paying their taxes.

In the early 1600s, Russia was in a transitional stage. The last tsar of the Rurik Dynasty had died and there was a fierce power-struggle, which ended in the 1610s and 1620s, with the establishment of the Romanov Dynasty, which would rule Russia until the Revolution of 1917.

The fighting caused by this power-struggle had left the Russian Treasury empty. To get much needed money for the government, and to stop the widespread tax-evasion of the time, the Russian Government decided that the fastest way to get money was to tax the one thing that everyone relied on…salt.

Salt was essential to the Russian diet. It was required by everyone to salt and preserve the fish and meat which was at the time, a staple to the Russian people. The salt tax infuriated the Russian citizens and in 1648, everything came to a head with the Moscow Salt Riot.

You wouldn’t think that much would happen. A bunch of peasants and serfs, middling sorts and shopkeepers rioting over a lack of salt couldn’t be that big, could it?

By the end of roughly ten days of rioting, half of Moscow lay in ruins, burned to the ground by people who refused to pay taxes on such an essential component of Russian life.

Such is the importance and significance, rarity and necessity of salt.

Pepper

There are several varieties of pepper. It holds the world record as being the most commonly used spice in the world. The most common pepper that people are familiar with is Piper Nigrum…’Black Pepper’.

Pepper was once a prized and rare spice. It’s native to the Asian regions of the world, around India, and the South Pacific countries. Access to this desirable but faraway spice caused the opening of the Spice Trade. The Spice Trade had existed for centuries. It started in the Mediterranean, and spread east from there, to countries such as Persia, Afghanistan, Siam, China, India, Korea, Malaya, and Indochina. The Spice Trade was done by sea, with routes running through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The Trade was also run through overland routes, such as the famous “Silk Road” through China. A lot more than pepper was traded, however. Popular spices included cinnamon, cumin, ginger and turmeric. Along with spices, silks, exotic woods, ivory, cloth and other exotic items were also traded. Pepper remained the backbone of the Spice Trade, however, because it was heavily used, much like salt, to flavour food, and/or to disguise the taste of less-than-fresh meat or fish.

Sugar and Spice, and Everything Nice

Aaah, sugar. Sweet, sweet, wonderful sugar. Brown, white, crunchy and sweet. The bane of dentists, dietitians and purveyors of health-food. This legendary substance has been used in everything from candy to chocolate, sauces, cakes, pies, muffins, cookies, and even meat! But, like salt before it, sugar was once a valuable commodity used only by the very rich.

Sugar is native to India. There, it is grown in the sugarcane plant. The juice or water extracted from the cane-reeds is a sweet liquid (…which is incredible to drink, by the way…) which for many years, remained untapped. For most of the world, the main sweetener was still honey, extracted from beehives. But when Indians learnt how to refine the sugar-water, and extract pure sugar-crystals from it, the sugar-trade exploded!…or not.

The issue was that sugar produced from sugar-cane was expensive and had a relatively low yield. As a result, sugar was incredibly expensive, and remained a luxury item and status-symbol throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. If you could afford sugar, you were rich!

Sugar started becoming cheaper when, in the 1700s, it was discovered that another plant, the sugar beet, was also high in natural sugar. Sugar-beets were easier to grow and more plentiful. The discovery of the beet and it’s link to sugar was made in the mid-1700s, but it wasn’t until the 1810s that sugar-beet production and harvesting really took off! By the Victorian-era, sugar was becoming much cheaper, and the candy industry, with boiled sweets, chocolate-bars, cookies, cakes, pies and puddings really began to take off. Sugar-consumption shot up significantly during the 1800s.

Honey

Honey is something that everyone is likely to have in their house. It’s sweet, sticky and delicious. And it’s also healthy and good for you! Among other things…

Honey has been known to mankind for centuries. And before the rise of sugar in the early 19th century, it was the main sweetening agent used in cooking. Honey was used for a lot more than making things sweet, though. Just like salt, honey is a natural preservative. Food could be sealed in honey to keep it fresh for weeks and months at a time. Fruit and nuts were often stored in jars of honey to keep them fresh and sweet, during the summer months, so that they could still be eaten during the winter months, when fruits were less plentiful. Honey is such a good preservative that jars of ancient honey found by archaeologists are still good to eat today, thousands of years later. In some countries, honey was even used to preserve dead bodies.

Honey is also an antiseptic, and was used to treat and clean wounds on the battlefield in ancient times. English monarch, King Henry V, was shot in the face with an arrow during the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, while fighting under his father’s command. The battlefield surgeon cleaned the wound with honey, removed the arrowhead and bandaged the then-prince’s face. Prince Henry survived his injury, and the battle, and succeeded his father, Henry IV, in 1413.

From those reading this who suffer from bowel-issues, you might be relieved to know that honey is also a laxative. Raw honey, in as pure, and as unprocessed a state as it’s possible to buy, has a lubricating effect on the body, which helps relieve digestive issues such as constipation. Feeling a bit blocked up? Make yourself a couple of pots of tea with a good dose of raw honey mixed in. Not only is it delicious, but you’ll feel much better after a couple of hours…

Butter and Margarine

Anyone who’s ever done the schoolboy experiment of dropping two marbles into a jar of cream, sealing the lid and shaking the jar until your arms drop off, will know how butter is created (and yes, that is how butter is created…constant agitation of cream).

Butter is one of the most essential ingredients in the world. For cakes, for pies, for cookies, for sandwiches, for hot toast on cold nights, for greasing up the toastie-maker before making a grilled-cheese sandwich.

Butter has been around for centuries. Commercial exporting of butter is traced back to the 1100s in Northern Europe. For a long time, butter was considered a peasant’s food, fit to be consumed only by farmers and peasants. Eventually, however, butter became accepted as food for all classes, from kings and emperors downwards.

Because it’s a dairy product, storing butter was a problem. It had to be kept in such a way that it didn’t melt or spoil. Where possible, it was kept cold, underground, or in ice-houses or ice-boxes. Where the ground-conditions allowed it, butter was stored in barrels and buried in peat-bogs! This method of preservation was common in Ireland up until the end of the 1700s.

Butter became wildly popular in the 1800s. Sauces and dressings for salads and a variety of savory dishes were made using butter. In France in the 1860s, butter became so widely used that there was a severe butter-shortage! Emperor Napoleon III famously set up a nationwide competition! A prize, to anyone who could mass produce a cheap, effective and worthy substitute for butter, that would feed the poor and provide sustenance to the French Army! The prize was finally claimed in 1869, by French chemist Hippolyte Mege-Mouries. Mege-Mouries built on research done by other chemists, and developed the wonder-spread that would save France from a butter-drought! He named it..Oleomargarine…or just ‘margarine’ for short.

Margarine, made from vegetable fats and oils, instead of milk-fat, as butter is, has  always had a bit of a stigma. It’s seen as the poor-man’s butter. The cheap substitute that it was back in the 1860s is a stigma that is yet to be removed from its character. In fact, margarine was seen as so offensive, that it was actually prohibited in certain countries!

Because manufacturing cheap margarine would harm the local dairy industries, in the United States and Canada, the production and sale of margarine was made illegal! And…just like in the U.S.A. in the 1920s…it led to bootleg margarine. Hard to imagine, but it did! In the end, margarine-bans were ended (Canada, in 1948, America, during the late 1960s), but taxes and ‘margarine licenses’ meant that it wasn’t quite as cheap as probably it should’ve been. In the United States, there was a Margarine Tax (2c/lb). 2 cents a pound doesn’t sound like much, but back then, 2 cents was the price of a newspaper!

Potatoes

…Yes. Potatoes.

The humble spud has some pretty interesting stories to tell. It was once considered inedible and filthy. It came from the ground, covered in crud that you had to scrape off, after all…who wants to eat that!?

The potato comes from South America. It was introduced to Europe by the Spanish in the Early Modern Period. But acceptance was slow and grudging. It was considered cheap, peasanty food, not worth for anything but pig-feed. In fact, in the 1780s and 90s, when France was undergoing a record famine due to crop-failures, the French would rather starve to death than eat potatoes!

The potato-promoter extraordinaire was a Frenchman. His name was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier.  It was he who suggested that the potato, a versatile and adaptable food, would be the savior of the French people during their time of need! He was so convinced of this that he hosted dinners at which NOTHING was served…but potatoes…in one way, or another. For every single course. He even did this to the French king, Louis XVI! In the 1770s, the French medical society finally agreed that the potato was not the filthy, poisonous, and dangerous thing that came out of the ground, but, grudgingly, accepted that it could be eaten…this still didn’t stop the French from avoiding it like the plague, though…

The potato was the staple food of the Irish people for much of the 1800s. When the potato crops failed in the 1840s and 50s, thousands of desperate Irish men, women and children immigrated to the United States to save themselves from starvation.

But the most famous story about the potato is not how it became accepted into polite society, or how it affected patterns of immigration, but rather, how it became the popular potato-chip.

If you dug deep enough, you could (and some people have) found proof that this happened before this date, but the generally accepted story is that the crunchy, salted potato chip was invented in the following manner:

Moon’s Lake House, Saratoga Springs, New York, U.S.A. 1853. Moon’s Lake House is a popular eatery and holiday resort in the town of Saratoga Springs. The resident chef is an African-American, a young (by then, in his early 30s) man named George Crum. The fashion of the time was to slice potatoes into thick chunks, sort of like wedges, and fry them, so that they could be eaten with a knife and fork. A customer repeatedly sent back his fried potatoes to the kitchen, insisting that the slices were too thick, and so soggy that they kept breaking apart on his fork!

Insulted by this, Crum shaved the next order of potatoes until they were paper-thin! He flash-fried them in oil until they were crunchy and hard, and then showered them all over with a huge amount of salt! He sent the potatoes back out…

To his surprise, his new invention was a hit! Potato-chips made Crum rich! In a restaurant that he opened himself, after the American Civil War, Crum served potato chips in baskets on all the tables, as a snack-food for his diners before their meals.

Did Crum invent potato chips? There are some who believe so. There are some who believe that they existed before then, but were not named as such. However they arrived on the scene, they have remained popular for over a hundred and fifty years…

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The Land of the Free: America’s Immigrant History

 

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Ever since it was colonised by the master of colonial powers back in the Stuart era, the United States has been a land of immigration, innovation and industry. Those immortal words, part of a poem by writer Emma Lazarus, have adorned the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor for over a century, since they were first put there in 1903. They poetically remind us of America’s great immigrant past.

America. The United States. The U.S. The Arsenal of Democracy. The global policeman who Theodore Roosevelt said should: “Speak softly and carry a big stick”.

Empires and their influences rise and fall, whether or not they be empires in the truest sense of the word, or not. The Chinese Empire. The Russian Empire. The Soviet Empire. The Greek Empire. The Roman Empire. The Japanese Empire. The French Empire. The Byzantine Empire…the list is almost endless. But right now, one could argue that we are in the midst of an American Empire.

At the time of the British Empire, British influence and culture spread throughout the world…much like how today, American influence and culture does the same. The British brought us language, culture, food, government, schools and tray after tray of delicately-sliced, daintily-prepared cucumber sandwiches. The Americans gave us trash-talk TV shows, Oprah, supermodels, shamelessly expensive designer consumer-goods and a plethora of cheap, fattening, greasy fast foods the likes of which have never been seen or tasted before.

One could say a lot of bad things about America. But then one could say a lot of bad things about almost any country on earth. But America’s history is one of constant hardship, struggle, invention, innovation, creativity, renewal and grudging acceptance.

So. Where do we begin?

Finding the New World

People have been aware of the American continent for centuries. Ever since the late 15th century. Everyone knows that in 1492, an Italian man named Christopher Columbus sailed across the Pond. He reached the other bank and he found a great, vast, untouched country. He called it!…

…India.

Columbus was looking for a passage to India and the Middle East. He hadn’t counted on bumping into a huge landmass halfway through his journey. But he did. And since he was looking for India, he assumed that this was India! For that reason, he named the natives who came to greet him…Indians.

They’re not, of course. But today, the term “American Indian” still survives. All because of a simple geographical error.

Eventually, the American continent became known as the “New World”, to differentiate it from the “Old World” (ie: Europe).

Knowledge of this “New World” had been around for a while. In 1583, a fellow named Humphrey Gilbert, from England, found a new landmass off the coast of the American continent. He claimed it for Queen and Country (‘Queen’ being Elizabeth I) and gave it a name which we still have today. His newfound landmass would be named…um…

Newfoundland.

Yeah, they weren’t very big on fancy, inventive, creative names back in Tudor times.

Attempts to colonise America had been around for a while. A lot of countries wanted to go to America. France, Spain and England particularly, were all fighting for their own slices of this new action. The first successful British colony was established in 1607 during the reign of King James the First.

Jamestowne, Virginia: A Shaky Start

In the early 1600s, a group of daring colonists set sail across the Atlantic. Backing them up was the Virginia Company of London. This company was established purely for the purposes of setting up a British colony, or set of colonies, on the American continent. Many people had tried in the past, but all of them had been failures for one reason or another. But in 1607, they succeeded! Yay!

They named their new settlement Jamestown. And the land around them they named ‘Virginia’, after the company that sponsored their little adventure. They built huts, set up palisades, grew crops, sold discount DVDs…everything was cool!

…or not.

The colonists needed to choose the site of their new settlement very carefully. Somewhere with wood for building and for fuel, somewhere close to water for drinking, and water-transport, somewhere clean and comfortable, and somewhere free from the savage natives!

To this end, they selected a spot in the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia, near the mouth of the aptly-named James River. It was perfect! The peninsula was created by the convergence of two waterways. The James River on the south, the North River on the…um…north…lots of lovely land to the west, and to the east, Chesapeake Bay!

But, best of all these things…there were no savage natives around! wonderful! Perfect! Fantastic!

They thought this was so fantastic that they completely forgot to take into account…WHY…there were no savage natives around.

What at first seemed like the perfect place to set up shop soon became a nightmare. The reason there were no natives here was because it was a terrible place to be. And when the locals don’t go there, it’s best that you don’t, either.

The area had a lot of stagnant, still water all over the place, because of the huge amounts of water from the two rivers that emptied into the bay. This stagnant, stale water was impossible to drink. And it bred mosquitoes that buzzed around all over the place! The ground was so wet and soggy from the nearby waterways that it was impossible to grow anything there. The crops would become waterlogged and just rot in the ground. And what land that there was actually available for settlement was so small that it was considered a waste of time to even try starting!

Just about everything was against them. Too late to go out finding somewhere else to sleep for the night, the colonists had to make do with whatever their poor choice had given them to do whatever they needed to do, with. And that wasn’t much.

To set up a colony, the menfolk would have to chop down trees, de-branch logs, cut planks or beams, or cut notches in tree-trunks to create logs and somehow build simple wooden or log-cabins. They also had to clear land, plow fields and grow crops!

Can you do that?

Neither could they!

The problem was that they’d arrived in America too late in the year. By the time they’d managed to get their settlement together, such as it was, it was already the middle of May, 1607, and rapidly approaching June. The issue here was that there wouldn’t be enough time to plant crops and get them to grow to a sufficient size to harvest for food, before winter came and killed everything!

On top of that, there was not a single farmer amongst them. They were all merchants, tradesmen, gentlemen of means, ladies of leisure, children, and household domestic servants. Even those who were used to hard work could chop wood or cook food or wash clothes. But farming?

They didn’t have a clue.

Conditions got so bad that soon they were all starving. During the 1600s, the world goes through what is called the “Mini Ice Age”, which doesn’t end until the early 1800s. Temperatures get so cold that in England, it’s not uncommon for the River Thames in the very heart of London to freeze over! You could skate from one bank of the river to the other! Or even take a sleigh and horses, because the ice is that thick!

What does this mean for the colonists?

Well, with harsh winter weather, little food and less firewood, they begin dropping like flies. Of the original five hundred colonists, by the end of 1607, there are only 449 left! And by the end of 1610, there’s only 61 left!

The colonists were in really bad shape. Even if they wanted to start farming, they couldn’t, because they didn’t have the skills necessary to do it. The local natives did try to help them out, but local assistance only goes so far. Soon, the colonists were fighting with the Indians. Not a good idea. Mostly because the Indians are armed with bows and arrows, and the colonists with unreliable matchlock muskets. What’s the issue here?

Well, while the bow and arrow is an older technology, it operates at a much, much faster rate of fire than the muskets of the time. In the end, the colonists capture the daughter of the local chieftain and hold her to ransom. The war ends and they sign a peace treaty. But the Indian girl is kinda cute, so one of the colonists marries her and takes her back to England as a sort of walking advertisement for exotic life in the New World. Her name becomes famous all over London.

Pocahontas.

Her husband was John Rolfe, one of the first successful tobacco farmers in colonial America. They sailed for England in 1616. They would’ve sailed back home to America in 1619 at the end of their tour of England, but Pocahontas died before they could make the journey.

Jamestown struggled on for several more decades. But it was finally abandoned at the close of the 17th century, in 1699.

The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony

The other famous group of settlers in early American history were a group of persecuted religious types. Known today as the Pilgrim Fathers, or simply, the Pilgrims, these English men, women and children followed the Christian puritan religion.

And they weren’t exactly popular for doing so.

Just as the name suggests, the puritans believed in leading…pure lives. This meant that religion was central to their way of acting, living and thinking. Puritans believed that many of the things that we take for granted today, were sinful in the eyes of the Lord, and should be illegal. Things like: Christmas, gambling, games, sport, presents and theater! No wonder they weren’t exactly popular…

So persecuted were they that the puritans decided to leave England and sail for the New World. And they did so on one of the most famous ships in history.

The Mayflower.

Fed up of the trouble and persecution caused by King Charles the First in England, the puritans decided that they had to escape. To this end, they boarded a ship at the English port town of Plymouth, and set sail due west, for the American continent.

The Mayflower might be famous, but it wouldn’t be my first choice for a transatlantic crossing.

The ship was tiny. About 30m long by 7.5m wide (110 x 25ft), with four decks. The space between the decks was about five feet high! Crammed into this bathtub with sails were about 130 passengers and crew. About 105 passengers, and about 25 to 30 sailors. If that sounds crowded, then be glad the ship didn’t leave with it’s original, full complement of 150 passengers and crew! About twenty passengers got off the ship when it docked at Plymouth, and refused to get back on. On top of this, the ship was not designed to transport people! It was a merchant vessel. A cargo-ship designed to transport barrels of wine!

The Mayflower left England on the 16th of September, 1620. And they were probably glad to be on their way! Two previous attempts to leave, with another ship along for the ride (the ‘Speedwell‘) had been marred by misfortune. The Speedwell sprung a leak on both previous attempts, and the ships had to keep turning back to England. Originally supposed to leave with two ships from the famous English port of Southampton, the pilgrims now left with one ship, from the port city of Plymouth, England. But finally, they were on their way.

The voyage took sixty-six days across the Atlantic. They arrived along the Eastern coast of the American continent in what is modern day Massachusetts. It is the 9th of November, 1620. They dropped anchor, lowered the ship’s boats and rowed ashore. Landfall was made on a large, smooth grey rock on the Massachusetts shoreline. Today, this unassuming chunk of stone is called Plymouth Rock.

Or is it?

The traditional story is that the Mayflower left England, beat a path across the sea, dropped anchor off the American coast, lowered its boats, the passengers and crew rowed ashore and the first of their feet hit American soil, standing on a large rock on the beach. But is it true? Nobody really knows. No accounts written by the pilgrims back in the 1620s make any mention of a rock of any kind. The first written record of it ever existing didn’t show up until the mid-18th century, ca. 1741.

The man responsible for this was Thomas Faunce. Faunce, by then nearly a hundred years old (to be precise, the incredible age of 94!), had been town record-keeper of Plymouth, Massachusetts, for most of his life. It was he who identified the rock which, so his father had told him, was the actual ‘Plymouth Rock’ which the Pilgrims first touched when they arrived in America.

Whether or not it’s 100% true is up for debate. But in America today, you can still go to Massachusetts and see Plymouth Rock. It’s still there, housed in its own special little protective structure by the sea.

Just like the settlers at Jamestown, the Pilgrims had to fight to survive. To try and make this easier, they wrote and signed the first proper legal document in American history. The Mayflower Compact.

The details of the compact listed the laws, rules and regulations which were expected within the colony, and which all signers were sworn to follow and obey, in order for the colony to have the best chance of survival.

The actual Compact is long gone. But copies of what it probably looked like have survived to this day, preserved in the texts of books written and printed shortly after the arrival of the pilgrims. The text of the Compact, as recorded in various contemporary papers and books from the period, read as follows. (The spelling and grammar is modern, but the text is unchanged from the original document):

The Text of the Mayflower Compact (1620)

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620

Despite this nice piece of paper and all that it entails (it takes a while to cut through the incredibly convoluted nature of 17th century English, but it’s not that hard to read and understand!), life for the Pilgrims in Massachusetts was no easier than that for the settlers at Jamestown. Disease and starvation killed several people before the end of the year.

By 1621, the colony of New Plymouth begins to take shape properly. Local native Americans make friends with the pilgrims. They show them where to fish, how to fertilise the local soil so that their crops of corn will grow. The pilgrims hunt for turkeys with their muskets.

In November, 1621, one year after their arrival, the pilgrims hold a feast to show their thanks for God’s mercy, and to show their appreciation to the local natives who had helped them survive their first twelve months in this new and alien world. Today, it is the American holiday of Thanksgiving.

The pilgrims and the Jamestown settlers become America’s first permanent English-speaking settlers.

Other Colonists

Early America wasn’t just colonised by the British. Great swathes of the country were colonised by the French, the Dutch and the Spanish, to the south, north and west respectively. You can still see their influences in the place-names today: Louisiana – named for King Louis of France, Vermont – French for ‘Green Mountains’ and the original name of the New York Borough of Manhattan: New Amsterdam.

The Great Migrations

In the period before and after the American Civil War (1861-1865), there were periods of mass migration. The first migration came from within: African-Americans held in slavery in the South fled North. Racism existed everywhere, but in the North, people were generally more tolerant, open, respectful and less prejudiced.

One of the greatest numbers of migrants to the United States were the Chinese.

Fleeing famine and unrest in China, thousands of them swarmed across the Pacific Ocean to American port-cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. In the 1860s, America is attempting the world’s first transcontinental railroad. Irish railroad workers refuse to do the backbreaking and incredibly dangerous work of boring, blasting, shoveling, tunneling, laying sleepers, gravel, tracks and driving in millions of rivets and spikes. The Railroad is made in an age where old-fashioned gunpowder (‘black powder’) is still the main explosive. Of only moderate effectiveness, the only other alternative is the highly unstable nitroglycerin. It’s so dangerous that it can explode at the drop of a hat. Transporting it is made illegal, and even under controlled circumstances, accidents are common.

The Chinese, lured to the United States by stories of work, money and a stable life, flock to California. Some have already been there since the 1850s when the California Gold Rush spread gold-fever around the world. To this day, San Francisco boasts the biggest Chinatown in the entire United States. One of the most famous Chinese foodstuffs which isn’t Chinese at all, is created there – The fortune-cookie.

The other great migration came from the 1840s onwards. Driven from their homeland by constant crop-failures, the Irish people are starving to death because their staple food is almost nonexistent. During this time, the diet of the Irish poor is made up mostly of beer, bread, cheese and that wonder-crop…the potato.

Yes. The Irish are the world’s biggest per-capita consumer of french fries.

When the Potato Blights started in the 1840s, Irish families starved. Farmers were unable to farm and with no potatoes to sell at market, they were unable to pay rent. And this got them in trouble with the absentee landlords – Wealthy Englishmen who owned estates in Ireland. Called ‘absentee landlords’ because they never bothered to visit their Irish estates. They only paid attention to them when the money stopped flowing, which happened more and more as the 1800s progressed. Poor Irish families were evicted, and landlords would even burn down their houses to stop them from coming back.

The Irish fled to the United States in their thousands. They settled in the big cities and in small towns, blending in with American society.

As the 1800s progressed, more and more people poured into the United States, the oft-toted ‘Land of the Free’. The majority of people living in America today can boast some degree of European immigrant history.

Immigration in America grew from a trickle, to the occasional rush, to a steady flow, into a torrent of humanity, forcing their way in. To regulate the flow of immigrants, the American Government established the world’s most famous immigration check-point in history. This place:

Ellis Island Immigration Center, New York, U.S.A.

As far back as 1855, the United States had been processing immigrants through official arrival-centers. On the Eastern Seaboard, the main one was the Castle Garden Immigration Center.

Previously a defensive fort built on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, Castle Garden (today Castle Clinton) Immigration Center was America’s first immigration-center. The castle or fort had existed since 1808, it became an immigration-center in 1855. It remained one for nearly forty years.

But Castle Garden was not fully-equipped to be an immigration-center. It didn’t have all the proper facilities and it was located on the increasingly crowded Manhattan Island. It was decided that there had to be a PROPER immigration-center, purpose-built for the processing of immigrants.

Ellis Island Immigration Center started operation in 1892. It finally closed in 1954. By the time it ceased to be a functioning immigration-center, it had processed 12,000,000 people.

Today, over 100,000,000 Americans can trace their family history back to someone who passed through the gates at Ellis Island.

Who Came to Ellis Island?

The majority of people who came to the United States through the immigration-center at Ellis island were Europeans. Swiss, Swedes, Spanish, Germans, Poles, French, and as the 20th century dawned, a large number of Eastern European, mostly Russian, Jews. The pogroms (race riots) in the Russian Empire at the time forced many Jews to flee Eastern Europe for their own safety. Some merely moved to other countries within Europe, such as Poland, or Germany, or France. Some moved to the United Kingdom. But more and more were willing to risk everything on a third-class ticket to the New World.

To sail across ‘The Pond’ on a total guess was a big step. Most of these people were going to a totally new country. A country they probably only read about in newspapers, in books, or heard about from friends, or read about in letters. This legendary country called ‘America’, where the streets were paved with gold and where anybody could make it big!

The Immigration Process at Ellis Island

In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, great steamship companies such as Cunard, White Star, French Line, the Hamburg-America Line and so-forth, the big, transatlantic companies, got a lot of their money, not from the wealthy first-class passengers who swanned across the Pond in lavish style and luxury, but rather from the hundreds and thousands of poor European immigrants who fled their homelands to try their luck in the New World, this land of the free, the home of the brave.

To get from Europe to America was a voyage of at least a week. Even the fastest ships could only manage it in about six or seven days (even today, modern ocean-liners will take up to four days). But what happened when the ship reached New York?

The ship would sail into New York Harbor, past the great Statue of Liberty, the first sight of America that any of these immigrants was ever likely to see. Passing the Statue, they would sail past the Five Boroughs to New Jersey. Here, they were offloaded, and they and their luggage were dumped onto ferries. Ferries ran shuttle-services to and from Ellis Island, off the southwest coast of Manhattan.

Once you reached the island, you were shepherded off and sent to the main immigration-hall. Here, your luggage was stacked, and then you headed upstairs to the Great Hall. The hall was broken up by steel and wooden barriers, long benches and barricades. You selected the appropriate line, got into it, and worked your way down towards the desks at the far end. Here, your papers would be examined and cross-checked, such as passports, tickets, visas and so-forth. Interpreters speaking the main European languages were on-hand to assist with any language-barriers.

If everything checked out, you went onto other lines and categories. You would be medically examined, your intelligence checked, and starting in 1919, your literacy as well. This process could take hours…or it could take months! In the end, one of three things would eventually happen:

1. You were passed fit for immigration. You could gather up your luggage from the luggage-room downstairs, and then head to the “Kissing Post”. 

The ‘Kissing Post’ was given its current name because this was the exit-passageway from the main immigration-hall. It was where friends, family-members or sponsors waited for their newly-arrived companions or additional family-members. Couples, families and friends would meet here in the passageway, head outside and board a ferry for New York, ready to start their new lives in their new home.

2. You were put into Quarantine.

Not everyone who came to Ellis Island could leave right away. If you were found to be ill, or lacking in any physical or mental capacity, you might be refused entry to the United States, or you might be put into quarantine. Medical officers, nurses, orderlies and doctors prowled the floors of the immigration-center, examining new arrivals. Every single immigrant was given a quick (and I mean QUICK! Less than a minute!) checkup by a doctor to assess their condition. If there were no issues, the person could pass through. If there were, a chalk-mark would be pressed into their clothes. The marks that the medical-officers on Ellis Island employed included:

B – Back (Potential back-problems, spinal problems, etc).
C- Conjunctivitis (Pink-eye. An infection of the eye).
T – Trachoma (another type of eye-infection)
E – Eyes (for potential vision-issues).
F – Face (for potential facial issues).
FT – Feet (for issues with feet, walking, mobility, etc).
G – Goiter.
H – Heart.
K – Hernia (ouch!)
L – Lameness.
N – Neck.
P – Physical (general medical issues).
PG – Pregnancy.
S – Senility or Alzheimer’s Disease.
SC – Scalp and hair issues.
SI – ‘Special Inquiry’.
X – Suspected Mental Illness.
(X) – Certified mental illness.

Depending on the mark made on your clothes, you could be held in quarantine for days, or even weeks at a time, until you were cured. Ellis Island had playgrounds for children, dining-halls, a hospital and dormitories for all its quarantined immigrants. Once you were cured, you would be allowed to leave the island.

3. You were sent back to your home country.

This was the last and worst category that an immigrant could find himself in. You could be sent back to Europe for any number of reasons, from criminal records, not having enough money, or a sponsor (the immigration officials didn’t want people surviving on handouts!) or an unsatisfactory medical report. For many immigrants, being sent back was devastating. Many of them had sunk their life-savings into packing everything up and shipping their family across the Atlantic to the United States to start a new life. The only good thing to come out of this was the fact that the passage back home was free!

Returning immigrants didn’t have to pay for their passage home. It was provided by the steamship company that brought them there in the first place. Because the big liner companies didn’t like giving free passages to immigrants, the immigration process was very strict. Before you even got on the ship departing from Cherbourg, Naples or Southampton, Hamburg or Gdansk, you went through strict immigration processes, as tightly controlled, if not more so, than the one you would get at Ellis Island. This was to ensure that only the best candidates for worthwhile immigration ever made it through, saving everyone time and money.

Of course, some people wanted to get to America at any cost. If their medical examination was unsatisfactory, it wasn’t uncommon for people to wipe off the chalk-marks made on their clothes…or simply take off their clothes, or turn them inside out…and sneak off to the departure area, grab their luggage and board the next ferry leading to the mainland. They’d come this far and sunk all their money into this once-in-a-lifetime chance. They weren’t about to let a stupid white mark on their coat hold them back!

The End of Ellis Island

For sixty two years, Ellis Island was in operation. From 1892, until 1954. Business was steady for about half that time, and over twelve million people entered America through this most famous of all the immigration centers. Ellis Island was busiest between the 1890s up to the period after the First World War. In 1920, immigration restriction acts in many countries saw the end of the transatlantic immigrant trade, and ships from big companies like Cunard, the French Line and the White Star Line, stopped offering cheap berths to immigrants. The ‘steerage’ class on ocean-liners practically disappeared and was converted into a more respectable-sounding “Tourist Class” instead.

Despite the decline of the transatlantic immigrant-passages, Ellis Island remained open until well into the postwar years. It finally shut down in 1954.

Famous Ellis Island Immigrants

A lot of America’s most famous celebrities came to the United States by passing through the gates of Ellis Island. Among them were…

Irving Berlin – The famous songwriter.
Isaac Asimov – The novelist.
Chef Boiardi.
Frank Carpa – The film-director.
Cary Grant and Bob Hope (The famous actor and comedian, both from England).
Al Jolson – ‘The Greatest Entertainer of the 20th Century’.
Gus Kahn – The famous songwriter (from Germany).
Bela Lugosi – The horror actor.
Sgt. Michael Strank – WWII soldier. Raised the flag on Iwo Jima, 1945.
The Family Von Trapp – Made famous in ‘The Sound of Music‘.

America’s Immigrant History

America’s history is one of immigration. One of travel, escape, renewal, of multiculturalism and mingling. Without hundreds of millions of people daring to take the trip across the oceans to the New World, America as we know it today would never have existed.

A happy Independence Day to all the Americans reading this blog 😀

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Trains of Death: The London Necropolis Railway

 

In 1837, King William IV died. William was a popular monarch. friendly, personable, level-headed, and considerably more restrained than his notorious older brother, King George IV, who blew the royal bank account on lavish building projects, expensive coronation ceremonies, clothes, women, food and pleasure.

When William died, his young niece, Princess Victoria, ascended the throne as Queen Victoria. She would reign over the British Empire for the next sixty-three years.

During this ‘Victorian Era’, as this long stretch of history is called, the lives of ordinary people changed forever. By the end of the century, you had the first canned foods, the first preserved and processed foods, the first lightbulbs, the first mass-produced, off-the-rack clothes, you had the first generation of motor-vehicles that could go faster than a horse. You had revolutions in transport with ocean-liners, steamships and bicycles. You had revolutions in communications, with telegrams, the telephone, and the beginnings of modern radio. In every conceivable way, the lives of people were changing year by year, from science, technology, health, fashion, homemaking, consumer-goods, transport, medicine, communications, and mankind’s understanding of the world in which they lived.

But as much as the Victorian Era was about the changes to people’s lives, it was also just as much about the changes of people’s deaths.

The Deadly Victorians

Every age has its obsessions. In the Medieval world, it was religion. In the Georgian era, it was the thought of empire and the power of the Royal Navy. In the 1920s, it was to live rich, move fast, and die young.

In the Victorian era, probably more than anything else, their obsession was that of mankind’s mortality and that death was the inevitable end to everything that ever lived, is living, or which will live after us. In the Victorian era, death was big business.

While the Victorian era saw great advances in medicine and science, such as the first antiseptics, the first X-rays, the first really effective hospitals and the development of modern medical practices still followed today, it didn’t come without an incredible amount of death and suffering. And it was this which would remain a fixation to the Victorians for the entirety of Queen Victoria’s reign.

The Industrial Revolution hit high gear in the 1800s. Increases in mechanisation, machinery and manufactury meant that mankind was, for the first time, mingling on a daily basis with some extremely dangerous contraptions. For the first time, the chances of dying from boiler-explosions, fires, burns, scalding, falling from height, losing arms, legs, hands, fingers, feet and even eyes, to the dangers of fast-moving and unguarded machinery, became daily hazards of working life.

On top of that, death came from the home as well. Poisons, poor food, poor sanitation, exploding stoves, household fires and disease from overcrowding and poor housing and epidemics of powerful disease caused death on an unprecedented scale, in some circumstances, not seen since the Great Plagues of the Middle Ages, or the London Plague of 1665.

With this abundance of death everywhere, it’s unsurprising that the Victorians learnt quickly about the fragility of life and the swiftness of death. And it was this swiftness of death brought up some rather interesting business opportunities.

From pallbearers, coffin-makers, gravediggers, undertakers, stone-carvers, enbalmers, jewelers, tailors, and even funeral mutes.

If you don’t know what a ‘funeral mute’ is, take a look at one of the most famous books of the Victorian era: Oliver Twist. Early on, Oliver is apprenticed to Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker, who employs him as a ‘mute’, a sort of stand-in mourner to walk behind the casket at children’s funerals. Such was the Victorian obsession with death that they could think up jobs surrounding it, for almost anybody at any time at all.

And then, there were other surprising business opportunities which the Victorian obsession with mortality brought. And they were a lot more lucrative than dressing in black, looking sad, and walking behind a coffin every day of the week. This brings us to one of the most famous of the Victorian industries of death…

The Necropolis Railway

Officially, it was called the ‘London Necropolis Railway’. And it is exactly what it sounds like: A train for the dead.

The Necropolis Railway was established in 1854, in response to the growing number of deaths which were the direct result of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution: Disease, overcrowding, malnutrition, poor sanitation, workplace accidents, accidents in the home, the result of a rising crime-rate and so-on.

As was the case in most cities, the dead were buried in local churchyards, or dedicated graveyards within, or immediately without, the city boundaries. If the graveyards were full-up, then the older graves, where the long-dead were buried, would be exhumed, and the bodies disposed of, to create new ground for more burials. This had worked fine when London’s population was small. But the Industrial Revolution caused a huge boom in the population and now, the dead were fighting with the dead, for space to be buried within London!…And the space simply wasn’t there!

By the 1850s, the situation had gone from bad to worse. Continued population booms had caused incredible pollution of London’s main waterway, the River Thames. This led to fantastic outbreaks of cholera. This lethal, waterborne disease was not fully understood in mid-Victorian times, and did not have a cure. The medical infection theory of the Miasma (‘My-az-mah‘) did not connect polluted water with infection and the spread of disease, believing instead that diseases were all airborne (“Miasma” literally means “Bad Air”).

The result of this misdirected thinking and theorising was that during the 1850s, there were huge outbreaks of cholera in London. Between 1848-1854, two cholera epidemics killed 15,200 Londoners. The death toll was so high that the graveyards within the city were quite literally overflowing with dead bodies. There were so man corpses that the city officials had nowhere else to dump them. People were keeping rotting, stinking corpses of their loved ones inside their houses for days…even weeks at a time…before they could be buried, for want of space.

Enter the Necropolis Railway.

The Necropolis Railway was established to deal with this incredible spike in deaths. In a few words, what it did was load the dead bodies onto trains, then transport the bodies far outside of what were then the boundaries of Greater London, to newly-established cemeteries.

So, how did this work?

Well, if your loved one died after 1854, and you needed to bury them somewhere, but no space could be found within the city of London to do so, you had two options:

The first was to have the body cremated and have the ashes either scattered, or stored in an urn for safekeeping and remembrance.

The second was to take the new, Victorian, high-tech solution to death, and use the Necropolis Railway.

If you chose Option 2, then your loved one would be prepared, dressed, placed in a coffin, and then the coffin would be carried to the London Necropolis Railway Station, in central London. The coffin (along with others, of course!) would then be loaded onto a train. The funerary train would then transport your loved one out of the Metropolis as fast as steam could take it. The station was very near to the more famous Waterloo Station in London,

The London Necropolis Railway Station. Built in the 1850s, the station was badly damaged during the Blitz in the early 1940s. The First Class entrance to the station is all that remains today

The Necropolis Railway is the truest sense of a one-way trip. Once the passengers got on, they were literally never coming back.

The train loaded with bodies would take a journey southwest. It was heading for the new cemetery, far outside of London…really far…even by today’s standards!

For it’s time, Brookwoods Cemetery was the largest cemetery in Europe! And some rather notable people are buried there. Perhaps you’ve heard of Dr. Robert Knox? He was famously connected to the two bodysnatchers, Burke and Hare. He’s buried there.

No? Then what about Mrs. Eleanor Smith? She died in 1931. Still nothing? Her husband died nearly twenty years earlier on the 15th of April, 1912…who was he? Captain Edward J. Smith, the first, last, and only…captain of the R.M.S. Titanic. Or perhaps an actual Titanic survivor? How about Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon? He’s buried at Brookwoods (and very close to Mrs. Smith!). Duff-Gordon famously got into a lifeboat on the Titanic with only twelve people inside it. For the rest of his life, he and his wife had to fight off allegations that he bribed the crew on the lifeboat five pounds each (a not inconsiderable sum in the 1910s) not to go back to the ship and rescue people in the water.

Working on the Railway

The London Necropolis Railway was more than just a train that you dumped dead bodies on to get them out of town. It was a highly regulated business. Passengers, both living (the mourners) and dead (the deceased) were segregated and categorised before they even got on the train.

Upon arrival at the station, coffins and mourners boarded the train according to class (even in death, Victorians were divided by class) and religion. There were two categories for religion: Church of England, and Nonconformist. ‘Nonconformist’ basically meant anyone who didn’t follow the Church of England, or who didn’t want a Church of England burial.

Passengers and the deceased were also divided by class. There were three classes: First, Second and Third. The class you selected (or the class that you could afford) affected many things. The type of carriage the mourners could travel in. The type of coffin in which the deceased was housed. Where the coffin was loaded onto the train. How it was loaded onto the train. How it was UNloaded from the train. How much care would be given to it, and its contents…all based on class, and how much money you were willing, or able, to cough up for the funeral.

Once the train left the station in London, it would reach one of various branch-lines near the Brookwoods Cemetary, depending on their passengers’ class and religion, so that burial services in line with the person’s financial status and religion could be carried out accordingly.

The London Necropolis Company, which owned and operated the railway and cemetery, had hoped to provide efficient, high-speed funerals for up to 50,000 people a year. Even after nearly ninety years of operation, however, it only achieved 200,000 burials in all, an average of about 2,200 burials a year, far below even its lowest target (10,000 a year).

Despite this, the railway and its peculiar cargo eventually became accepted by the London population. It was popularly called “The Stiffs’ Express”.

The Necropolis Railway ran trains which were strictly for the deceased, religious leaders, and for mourners attending funerals. But there were people who used the railway for less somber reasons.

Located near to Brookwoods Cemetery is the West Hill Golf Club. Wealthy golfers wanting to travel there had to take a train from Waterloo Station to the nearby town of Woking. First class, return, this cost 8 shillings.

Now, compare that to a ticket on the Necropolis Railway, running the same route, which cost just 6 shillings, return, in first class.

To take advantage of the cheaper fares, golfers would dress in black, the traditional colour of mourning, buy cheaper tickets from the Necropolis Station, hop on the Necropolis Train, and head off down south for a day of golf…

The End of the Line

The Necropolis Railway was dreamt up in the late 1840s in response to the first cholera outbreak in 1848. It wasn’t until 1854 that the service got underway properly. It continued plying its grisly trade for nearly a hundred years. In 1941, the Necropolis Railway Station in London (see photo, above) was bombed in the Blitz. It was a nearly direct hit on the station. Much of the building was badly damaged and the rail-tracks were blown to pieces in the explosion. The damage was so bad that when the war was over, much of the station was pulled down and the tracks torn up. The owners of the Necropolis Company deemed it too expensive to continue running the service, despite its successes, and so the company was officially closed in May, 1941.

Today, very little evidence remains of the London Necropolis Railway, or of the events that inspired this rather unique approach to handling death in a truly Victorian manner: By using the latest technology to get a big job done in a hurry. The station building that remains doesn’t even have a plaque or a nameplate or an engraving on it anywhere. If you walked by it in the street, you’d hardly notice it. And yet, it, and the place it led to, and the events that caused it to be there, are one of the great stories of history.

Interested in finding out more? A lot of information can be found from this article:

“The Last Train Home: The Necropolis Railway”, and the links and books that lead off from there.

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The Great Crossword Panic of 1944

 

This posting will chronicle one of those little, forgotten stories of the Second World War. It is one of the greatest examples that I can think of, where the old saying that ‘Truth is stranger than Fiction’, was never more true in the history of the world.

What Happened?

It is Mid-1944. The Second World War is reaching the beginning of the end. In just weeks, the Allies will make their great push towards France, blasting through Hitler’s famous line of defenses known as the “Atlantic Wall”. Spearheading the way is their mighty invasion force and their grand battle-plans, collectively known as “Operation Overlord”.

Joseph Stalin had been begging the Western allies to open up a Western front on the German war for years now, as the Red Army was being decimated by the rapidly advancing Germans. Although the Soviets had held off the Germans and forced them back from the city of Stalingrad in 1943, the Russians could not hope to take on the full force of the German war-machine on their own. To aid them, the Western powers had to divide and conquer the Germans, by splitting their forces. To do this, they had to force them to fight on two fronts at once: The Eastern Front, against the Russians, and the Western Front, against the British, American, French, Commonwealth and various free forces and resistance-groups in Europe.

Hence the necessity for Operation Overlord and all that it entailed.

The invasion was of course, a closely guarded secret. People who didn’t need to know about it were kept strictly in the dark. People who were working on it were never told what it was. And the people who knew what was going on were never allowed to tell anybody anything about it. As they say: “Loose lips sink ships”.

So…onto the Panic of 1944.

Across and Down

So closely guarded were all the aspects of the Invasion of Normandy, that it was inconceivable that anyone apart from the king, the prime minister and top military officials would know anything more about it than what the king, the prime minister and top military officials were want to tell them.

So, imagine their horror when the following chain of events took place…

May, 1944. Counter-espionage agents working for the British Security Service (more commonly known as ‘MI-5′, not, please, to be confused with the British Secret Intelligence Service…’MI-6’) could get incredibly bored on the job. Sometimes there just wasn’t anything to do around the office! So…what do you do when there’s nothing else to do? You read the newspaper.

By chance, some of the MI-5 chaps decided to have a shot at a few crosswords. After all, it was important to keep their minds sharp, and what better way than to test themselves with a few puzzles from the local papers? The papers which they had close to hand were those of the Daily Telegraph, a prominent London newspaper. Picking out the crosswords page, they started to solve the clues…

To their great alarm, the agents found that the answers to many of the clues were the codenames given to vital D-Day operations! Names such as…

‘Utah’ (Landing beach).

‘Juno’ (Landing beach).

‘Gold’ (Landing beach).

‘Sword’ (Landing beach).

‘Utah’ (Landing beach)

‘Omaha’ (Landing beach)…appeared in Daily Telegraph, 22nd May, 1944.

‘Overlord’ (Codename for the Invasion)…appeared in Daily Telegraph, 27th May, 1944.

‘Mulberry’ (Floating harbour)…appeared in Daily Telegraph, 30th May, 1944.

‘Neptune’ (Naval support for the invasion)…appeared in Daily Telegraph, 1st June, 1944.

Unsurprisingly, these results set off alarm-bells throughout MI-5! It now seemed that a German spy was using the newspaper crosswords to send vital information back to his masters in Berlin! Or possibly to other enemy agents working in Britain! If the enemy put two-and-two together, they could piece together the entire invasion-plan!

The Crossword Culprit

Acting swiftly, but most importantly, discreetly, MI-5 agents launched an investigation. The Daily Telegraph accepted crosswords sent into it by its readers. The agents tracked down the contributor who had sent in all the crosswords with the offending answers, and traced him to the quiet (just under 10,000 inhabitants as of 2012) town of Leatherhead, in Surrey.

The man they were seeking turned out to be Leonard Dawe. Dawe was a schoolmaster. In his spare time, he kept his mind active by writing up crossword puzzles and sending them to the Daily Telegraph as a way to earn a bit of extra money. He was interrogated relentlessly by the agents who captured him, and when they asked him why he chose those particular answers for his crosswords, he indignantly asked why he shouldn’t! There wasn’t a law against words…was there?

Well alright then…The agents then asked him who had supplied him with those words! Dawe had no idea what was going on, but told the truth anyway…his students from the local schoolhouse had suggested them!

As to where they heard them from, if they did at all…that’s anybody’s guess!

Dawe was found not guilty of any charges that the agents could try to pin on him and lived out the rest of the war. He died in January, 1963 at the age of seventy-three.

An amazing case of truth really being stranger than fiction…

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Warmth and Comfort – Keeping Warm Throughout History

 

In these days of central-heating, electric blankets, household insulation and increased stores of bodyfat, keeping warm and toasty at night is more of a privilege, a treat, an extra, added bonus, rather than an absolute necessity. But how did people snuggle up and keep warm at night, after the sun went down, before we had all these wondrous things such as insulated, centrally-heated homes, electrically-warmed blankets and fat, rustling wheat-bags infused with lavender?

This is a History of Household Warmth and Comfort.

Here in Australia, where the land is upside down, the weather is backwards, dogs miaow, cats bark, fish fly through the air and pigeons are not found at a depth below the natural penetration of sunlight through seawater, it is winter.

…Yes, we have winter here.

And it’s this nippy weather that has inspired this toastiest of all toasty subjects. So, how was it done?

Tapestries

No, don’t laugh. Really. Tapestries. Those pretty things that hang on the walls. What, you thought they were just there for decoration?

In the days before central heating, people hung tapestries on the walls of their rooms. Enormous, embroidered sheets of fabric, lavishly and beautifully and brightly decorated.  The fact that they were patterned and pictured to within an inch of their lives was a bonus. A delicate and decorative addition. But tapestries were not just hanging on the walls for the sake of art and beauty.

What people tend to forget is that, in winter-time, especially in the countries which experienced exceptionally heavy snowfalls, the interior of a house or building was often not much warmer than the temperature outside! The point of tapestries was to trap heat inside a room and act like a crude form of insulation. Where-ever possible, tapestries were hung to keep warm air in, and cold air out.

Curtains

Curtains did more than just keep out unwanted light. They have important insulating properties, keeping in warm air, and keeping out cold air, much like the tapestries that covered the walls. Curtains also stopped any unwelcome breezes or drafts from blowing in between the cracks and openings in early windows, from between the frames, or from between the shutters…don’t forget, please, that in medieval times…glass was a luxury!

Canopy Beds

You’ve probably seen these things in historic houses, museums, or in the ‘Harry Potter’ films. Large beds with canopies and curtains on all four sides. Again, they served the same purpose as the tapestries on the walls and the curtains in front of the windows. They kept in warm air, blocked drafts, and kept out cold air.

But all this passive warmth and heating doesn’t really do much, if you don’t already have  a source of heat which requires controlling. What were some of the ways in which our ancestors kept warm on cold winter nights? What did they use and how did they do it?

Bedwarmers

A bedwarmer is kinda like a big saucepan or frying-pan. You fill the pan of the bedwarmer with burning charcoal or ashes from the fireplace in the bedroom, close the lid, and then, holding the pan with the long handle, you slide it under the covers, between the blankets and the mattress, and there you left it, until it warmed up the bed. A bedwarmer looks like this:

The handle is so very long so that the bedwarmer can easily be slid to any part of even the largest bed. It’s also a precaution against burns.

Hot-Water Bottles/Water-bedwarmers

While coal-filled and ash-filled bedwarmers were very popular, there was always the potential risk of fire. A safer and more portable option was the hot-water bedwarmer or hot-water bottle.

A classic for centuries, the hot-water bottle is a simple and effective way to keep warm at night. Before more modern rubber bottles were invented, most people used sturdy copper bottles instead.

Copper is rustproof and an easy conductor of heat, and so was the natural metal for manufacturing hot-water bottles. Copper was used for any vessel where heating was involved, such as pots, pans, kettles…and of course…hot-water bottles.

Copper hot-water bottles came in a variety of sizes and shapes. Most took the shape of pillows or cushions, having circular, oval or cylindrical profiles. These were easy to hold and compact in size.

There were numerous benefits to a hot-water bottle over a bedwarmer. To begin with, you could take the hot-water bottle to bed with you, and keep it with you all night. They were smaller and more compact, and they were safer and easier to use.

Now you may have seen just such a bottle at a flea-market, or in antiques shop. They’re small, round, circular or oval-shaped objects with threaded caps at the top, in the middle, sometimes with a small metal handle on top.

Of course, if this was filled with boiling water, the metal would heat up so fast that the bottle would be impossible to hold without burning your hands. One of the first things the owner of a copper hot-water bottle did was to make a bottle-cosy.

A cosy or a bag, a pouch, if you will, was an absolute necessity to effective use of a hot-water bottle, and most of them were made at home, using available fabric and sewing-equipement. The fabric used for the bag had to be just right. If it was too thin, the heat would penetrate through it too fast, leading to burns. If it was too thick, then no heat would penetrate it, making it virtually useless.

Once the bag was made, the bottle was placed inside it, and the bag was closed with a simple drawstring. The bag, with the hot-water bottle inside, could now be safely carried to bed, with minimal danger of burns.

This ancient technology is surprisingly effective. These old bottles have no seams. So there’s no danger of anything splitting, ripping or tearing open. There’s no fear of punctures. The caps screw on tightly and securely and there’s no worries to be had about leaks.

This is my hot-water bottle which I regularly take to bed with me on cold winter nights:

It has a diameter of about 24 inches, and a height of about 4 inches. Its capacity is 1.75L (about three and a half pints) of water. How long does this water last?

I’ve had it remain warm to the touch for nearly 24 hours, wrapped up in bed. But effective warmth is about 9-12 hours, long enough for a good night’s sleep. After that time, the temperature of the water drops markedly, to a point where it’s not really useful for keeping your bed warm…But the water is warm enough to pour into the shaving-mug or scuttle in your bathroom, if you’re a guy and like traditional wet-shaving. And yes, that is what happens to the leftover water in my hot-water bottle. It ends up as shaving-water!

Dressing-Gowns

I don’t know many people who wear dressing-gowns. I think some people believe they’ve got some sort of feminine air about them, possibly. Whatever the cause, I don’t think people wear them very often anymore. And the dressing-gown has been a tradition in Europe, and other parts of the world where cold climates are to be found, for centuries. It’s that extra, snuggly layer of warmth that we all want to have.

Dressing-gowns were more common back in Victorian times, when clothing etiquette was much stricter than it is today. Dressing-gowns were worn at night, over pyjamas, or a nightshirt for extra warmth in houses without insulation and central heating, or were worn during the daytime over your everyday clothes, if you were half-dressed and had unexpected visitors.

Victorian manners and social etiquette meant that you NEVER entertained guests dressed in your shirt and trousers! If their unexpected arrival caught you in such a state, the options were to finish dressing, or to throw on your dressing-gown to cover up your incomplete state, and then greet your guests. Keeping the gown on was acceptable, or you could excuse yourself and complete dressing before returning to the reception-room. At no time was it acceptable to remove the gown if dressing was incomplete. Greeting or entertaining close friends and family dressed in your dressing-gown (usually over day-clothes or evening-wear) in a more casual and relaxed home-environment was acceptable.

If you’re looking for a comfortable way to keep warm this year, during the colder months, perhaps it’s time you started looking to history for a few ideas? They don’t use electricity and they’ll keep you just as warm as anything made today.

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Singer Attachment No. 160990 – Automatic Zigzagger

 

I never thought I’d get my hands on one of these, but wonders never cease. This is a Singer Automatic Zigzagger which I purchased today:

As sewing-machine technology improved significantly in the postwar years of the mid-1950s, with the the end of rationing (which in the United Kingdom, lasted twice as long as the war itself!), countries like America and the United Kingdom could start producing better and more advanced consumer-goods than ever. One of the new improvements was sewing-machines that could produce decorative zig-zag, slanting stitches, something unheard of before the war, with all prewar machines being ‘straight-stitchers’, performing a standard, straight lockstitch.

These newer, postwar machines worked by having the needlebar jerk back and forth, from left to right as the machine stitched from front to back. The side-to-side motion of the needle and the front-to-back motion of the machine allowed various types of decorative zigzag-stitches to be created. The machines were popular, but still very expensive. And Singer still had thousands of old-fashioned straight-stitch machines leftover from before the War. How to sell these older, increasingly out-of-date but still reliable machines to a public hungry for the newest postwar technology, not some dated, 1920s piece of junk?

Enter the automatic zigzagger.

A wide variety of zigzaggers, just like a wide variety of buttonholers, were produced by Singer, to be sold all over the world. This particular model, the 160990 (which also came in a 160991 variation), was manufactured for the European and British market (and by extension, the British Commonwealth) in Switzerland. It’s fitting that a country long-famed for its expertise in chocolates and watches, should manufacture an attachment of this quality. It’s exposed, it’s bare, it’s naked, it looks half-complete and you’re probably wondering where the rest of it is…but it is all there.

The beauty of this is that it’s very simple. The parts move freely and smoothly and won’t jam or seize up when the machine is in operation. It has a loose-ish feel to it, but that’s important when anything tighter would cause operational problems.

This zigzagger comes with its original cream box:

And it’s original manual:

It also comes with a dog-plate and all the necessary bits and pieces that go along with it. But most importantly, it comes with these:

These steel discs, roughly the size of a penny, are the cams that you insert into the zigzagger before commencing stitching. The cam you insert will determine the type of stitching that the zigzagger will produce. As the zigzagger operates, its arm will move over the ridges on the cams. The length and depth of each ridge determines the length and size of the stitch, and therefore, the pattern left behind by the zigzagger as it moves across the cloth.

They came in sets of five and ten cams (there’s eight there, so this would be a ten-cam set. Two of them are missing) as well as the zigzagger itself having a default cam set into it to produce a standard back-and-forth zigzag stitch.

Zigzaggers like these, with their cams, were simply fastened onto the machine via the presser-foot bar, in-place of the standard presser-foot. The arm or fork on the right of the zigzagger (in the photo above) went over and under the needle-clamp, moving up and down with the needle as the machine operated. These worked with all old-fashioned Singer straight-stitch machines and were very popular. For a couple of dollars more, you’d purchased a hardware upgrade to your machine and it could now compete with those newfangled “slantomatic” Singers that were just coming off the production-line.

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Lubricating your Sewing Machine – More Accessories!

 

In my ongoing quest to find bits and pieces to complete the restoration of my grandmother’s Singer 99k knee-lever sewing-machine, I have two kinds of lubricant, with which to tantilise you.

When you ambled into your friendly local Singer Sewing Center and left with your brand-spanking-new sewing machine, it would’ve come complete with all manner of wizzlewozzles and doohickies, doodads and thingdoodles.

Today, few vintage machines have these bits and pieces still with them. They’ve been used up, lost, thrown out, broken or just forgotten about, and you can’t just go back down to your local Singer shop to buy them anymore. So instead, you have to seek them out all individually and separately. It’s frustrating because you don’t always know what to look for. But sometimes, you get lucky.

Using the BRK motor-manual which I bought last week (see other posts in this category) as a guide for what to look for, I headed out into the world of the local flea-market. While there, in the pre-dawn chill of a Melbourne winter, with only my torchlight to guide me, I chanced upon this:

Holy mackrel! It’s a Singer oil-can!

After anywhere from 40-90 years, there’s obviously no OIL left in the can. But I bought it anyway, for a couple of dollars, for the sake of completeness. Why did I buy it?

Because, even though it’s as dry as the Sahara Desert, it is, nonetheless, the original style of oil-can that went with my machine when it was brand-new.

This is a a standard Singer bentwood case:

On the inside of that case, on the back left-hand side (if the ‘SINGER’ logo is facing you), is a little bent wire bracket, screwed into the paneling.

If you’ve got a Singer machine with a bentwood case and ever wondered what that bracket was there for…well…take a look at the picture of the oil-can up above. Keep it well in your mind, and then scroll down…

Yup! That little bent metal bracket is to hold the oil-can! See how nicely it sits in there and how HAPPY it is to finally be back home? You can tell it’s smiling. You can just tell.

When oiling your vintage Singer sewing machine, be sure that you oil all the moving parts which are MECHANICAL. That means NO OIL should go into the electric BRK machine-motor at the back/side of the machine. If you do that, horrible things will happen. It will heat up, start smoking and will probably catch fire and blow up, because the oil’s gone all through the motor, interfered with the electronics (such as they are on these old machines) and started an irreversible chain of catastrophic events.

Oil the pistons, shafts, cranks, levers, wheels, hooks…anything that’s mechanical. But do NOT apply sewing-machine oil to the motor. Or you’ll live to regret it.

But hold on. I told you I had TWO types of lubricant!…What’s the other one?

You might remember this manual from a previous posting:

Having read the warning, you’re sitting at your desk wondering “What the hell is this ‘motor-lubricant’ stuff?”

The motor-lubricant, which is the only thing that should be used to lubricate the BRK Singer sewing-machine motor, is a thickish, pasty substance. Originally, it came in this tube, which I purchased today for a paltry $1.00:

The tube is, structurally, in excellent condition, without cracks or leaks, and it’s almost completely full of its original supply of paste! This is the lubricant which you should use to lubricate your Singer BRK machine-motor.

If you can’t find any of these neat little tubes of paste, then nick down to your local sewing-machine shop (if you have one) or hardware store (if you don’t), and ask for good-quality motor lubricant. It should be like a soft, gel-like paste which can sit inside the motor and keep things nice and smooth, but without dribbling and leaking everywhere like oil would.

Once you have it, take it home and apply it sparingly, to the oiling holes either side of your Singer BRK machine-motor. The oiling-holes are these little metallic holes at either end of the motor:

See it? It’s that tiny little steel-lined hole, above the big, fat, black plastic screw-head. That’s why the nozzle on the paste-tube is so small, because it has to fit into that miniscule little opening.

Still hunting for more bits and pieces…