14/01/2012 by scheong

Things You Didn’t Know About…Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. One of the most famous people in history. You might know that…

– He was the leader of the United Kingdom for most of the Second World War.

– He was a great orator famous for his morale-boosting speeches.

– He was famous for popularising the “V for Victory” sign.

– He lived in a country house with his family. It was called ‘Chartwell’.

But here are some things about Churchill you probably didn’t know. The things that the history books in school don’t tell you about, because these things ‘aren’t important’. But things which are nonetheless interesting to know. For example. Did you know that…

– Churchill once appeared naked in front of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

It’s true.

During a trip to the United States shortly after the Attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Churchill was finishing his bath while talking to Roosevelt at the same time. During their conversation, Churchill’s towel accidently fell off, leaving him in a state of total undress while in the president’s company. Without skipping a beat, Churchill promptly declared: “You see, Mr. President? I have nothing to hide!”

– Churchill suffered a heart-attack during the War.

During the same trip to America, Churchill suffered a mild heart-attack. Due to the serious complications that would arise if the whole world knew that Churchill had a heart-attack, the issue was hushed up. Except by Churchill’s bodyguard and doctor, who recorded the incident privately in their records.

– Churchill liked playing Bezique.

Never heard of Bezique? Neither have I. Bezique is a card-game which is probably totally forgotten today, surpassed by Poker, Gin-Rummy, Blackjack, Snap, Bullshit and other more popular games. It was invented in France in the 1600s and was a popular card-game up until the late Victorian period. It died off quickly during the 20th century. But Churchill loved playing it with his wife whenever they had a spare moment alone.

– Churchill had a pet cat.

Yes he did! Or to be more precise, he had SEVERAL cats. The PM’s fondness of moggies isn’t widely known, but it’s true. Churchill’s most famous pet cat was called Nelson (as in Admiral Nelson). Churchill once declared that Nelson was doing his own bit for the war effort. Yes he was! Nelson saved on heating-costs and valuable coal by sleeping with Churchill and doubling as his hot-water bottle on cold nights! Despite the strict rationing that was enforced throughout Britain during the War, Churchill used to sneak Nelson slices of salmon when he thought Mrs. C. wasn’t looking. The last cat that he owned was given to him as a birthday present on his 88th birthday. The cat’s name was ‘Jock’.

A cat named Jock has been at permanent residence at Churchill’s country house of Chartwell ever since 1975 (when the original Jock died). The current cat of the household is Jock IV.

– In case any ship he was sailing in was attacked and captured or sunk, Churchill never used his own name while on a journey during the War. Instead, he was called ‘Colonel Warden’ to protect his identity.

– Churchill was a prolific drinker and smoker, consuming up to two bottles of champagne a day.

– Churchill’s nakedness wasn’t just limited to the bathroom where it might be expected. While he dictated speeches, or was busy sounding out new ones, he would sometimes get so distracted by his work that it wasn’t unknown for him to wander around Chartwell completely naked and forget that he wasn’t wearing any clothes! This fact was gleamed from the director’s commentary of ‘The Gathering Storm’, if anyone wants to know.

– Churchill was a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan.

– When Nazi leader Rudolph Hess landed in England in an attempt to broker a peace-deal with the British, upon being told of Hess’s arrival, Churchill famously declared: “Hess or no Hess, I’m off to see the Marx Brothers!”

– Churchill suffered from Depression.

Probably not surprising, considering what he went through in life! Churchill and his doctor called his melancholia his ‘Black Dog’. The Black Dog Institute (an organisation that deals with people suffering from Depression) is named after Churchill.

– Churchill didn’t die until he was 90 years old! He died on the 24th of January, 1965. His father also died on the 24th of january…1895! And his father died at the age of 45. Churchill lived to twice his father’s age and died on the same day!

– Churchill was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom TWICE. Once from 1940-1945 (his most famous term), and again from 1951-1955.

31/12/2011 by Scheong

What’s In A Name? Occupational Surnames

A discussion I had with some friends recently about names made me think of…well…names. But specifically, the origins and meanings of what are called ‘occupational surnames’. That is, the surnames that are derived from various historical occupations. The following posting is a list of some of the more common occupational surnames that have sprouted up over the centuries, and the origins of the names and the professions which they spring from. Maybe your surname’s in here somewhere?

Bowyer

As in: Thomas Bowyer (witness in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders of 1888).

If your surname is Bowyer, chances are that centuries ago, one of your ancestors was active in the manufacture of the high-powered weapon of the Middle Ages. The longbow. When the longbow was in its prime, it was most often made of the wood of the Yew tree. Bowstrings would’ve been made from linen or in even older times, animal sinew. Not for nothing was it called the longbow, however. For maximum range, speed and penetrating force, longbows were made as big as possible, often being the same size as the person who shot it. So a bow could be anywhere from five to six feet in height.

Butler

As in: Rhett Butler (Character in ‘Gone with the Wind‘; of ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!’ fame).

The surname ‘Butler’ comes from the French word ‘Butuiller’, or ‘bottler’. The ‘Butler’ was therefore the guy who looked after bottles…of wine! It’s from the same root and the same word that we get the occupation of ‘Butler’ as a domestic servant. Although in popular culture, the Butler is the all-seeing, all-knowing, discreet and conniving head of the household servantry, the post actually started out as being the official custodian of the home’s wine-cellar where the bottles that gave him his title were stored.

Chandler

As in: Raymond Chandler (Famous American crime-fiction writer).

If your name’s Chandler or if your last name’s chandler, then once upon a time, quite possibly, a long time ago, your ancestors worked in the lighting industry. A ‘chandler’ was the name given to a maker of candles. From which we also get the word ‘Chandelier’. The chandler’s job was to manufacture candles using wicks and wax (either natural beeswax or cheaper tallow, a sort of waxy substance derived from…animal fat!). Candles were made in a variety of ways. Longer stick-candles were usually made by tying the wicks to wooden frames and suspending the frames over vats of molten wax. Dipping the candle-wicks into the hot wax over and over and raising them out after each dipping caused the wicks to be coated in wax. The wax then dried and the candles were dipped again…and again…and again.

This was a long, slow process but it produced nice, slender candles. The other method for candlemaking was to lower the wicks into the middle of a mold and to just pour the candle-wax into the mold around the wick. This was used to make larger candles, but pouring boiling hot liquid wax could be extremely dangerous. Anyone who’s ever had wax get onto their hands while trying to blow out those big fat ornamental pillar-candles will know how painful a wax-burn can be!

Collier

As in: Peter F. Collier (of ‘Collier’s Weekly‘ fame)

The title ‘Collier’ was given to any person who had anything to do with coal. Whether he mined it, sold it, dug it out of the ground or even made charcoal (by burning wood). The collier had an important job. Coal, in its various forms and varities, was needed for a lot of things. Blacksmiths required coal to fire their forges, manufacturers of gunpowder required specially-made ‘charcoal’ (crushed to a powder) to mix with potassium nitrate and sulphur to create old-fashioned gunpowder, and ordinary homes required tons of coal to fire stoves and fireplaces.

Cooper

As in: Merian Caldwell Cooper (American filmmaker who created the 1933 classic ‘King Kong’).

‘Cooper’ is another occupational name. In older times, the ‘cooper’ was the man who made barrels…you know, the stuff that wine’s stored in? The place he worked in was called the cooperage. The word ‘Cooper’ comes from the Dutch word ‘Kup‘, meaning ‘tub’.

Any settlement, village, city or town of significant size was likely to have at least one cooperage and at least one cooper. Barrels were required for a lot of things, and not just wine. In 1605, the Gunpowder Plotters stored eighteen hundredweight (nearly a ton!) of black gunpowder in barrels in the undercroft of the House of Lords in London, in their epic (but failed) assassination-attempt of James I of England. Two hundred years later in 1805, the cooper’s craft was used to store something else. When Lord Horatio Nelson was killed by a sniper’s bullet during the Battle of Trafalgar, his corpse was stuffed into a barrel and was preserved during the voyage home to England for his funeral, by being submerged in brandy!

Falconer/Faulkner

As in: William Faulkner (American writer).

If your surname is ‘Falconer’ or it’s variation, ‘Faulkner’, then it might be possible, once upon a time, a long time ago, that one of your ancestors might, just might, have had a very special job. Not a very comfortable job. But certainly one that was very special.

A falconer is a man who trains, looks after and handles a falcon. One of these things:

Isn’t he just the most adorable, cuddly, snuggly little birdie?

This is a falcon. The falcon is a bird of prey that attacks small game. Because of their speed (grown Falcons can dive at a speed of up to two hundred miles an hour!), strength and predatory nature, they were prized as hunting-birds by medieval royalty. Falcons were caught, tamed and then trained to hunt small game such as smaller birds and rabbits for their masters. The person who looked after the falcons was called the falconer. His job involved a large number of duties all related to this very prized bird. Duties which included housing the birds, feeding them, exercising them, carrying them around (such prized birds would never dare sully their royal wings by flapping through common air!) and of course, recovering any prey or quarry that the falcon had managed to capture. Given that only kings and queens were allowed to hunt with falcons, being a falconer meant that you were a servant of someone rich and powerful. Of course, failing to look after your master’s falcons could result in some nasty punishments. If the falcon went missing, you, as the falconer, had to go after it. And even if you found it, the falcon was then allowed to remove 6oz. (about a third of a pound) of flesh from your body as punishment! Ouch!

Fletcher

As in: Dustin Fletcher (Australian football player).

A fletcher is an arrowmaker. The name comes from the ‘fletching’ that the arrowmaker attaches to the ends of the arrow-shafts. Fletching being the nice, colourful bits of bird-feather which he sticks on the ends, to give the arrows the required aerodynamic properties to spin in the air and be as accurate as possible. Before the rise of firearms in the Early Modern period, the fletcher had the important job of creating the most advanced and lethal form of ammunition then in existence. Bowmen had to train every single weekend for hours at a time to ready themselves for battle. An arrow tipped with a steel point could be fired with enough force to pierce plate-armour, chainmail and penetrate flesh. In the Battle of Hastings, King Harold of the Anglo-Saxons was killed by an arrow to the eye. That is the fletcher’s craft at work.

Fuller

As in: Kurt Fuller (American actor).

‘Fuller’ is one of the less obvious occupational names that has survived through the centuries. A fuller was a cloth-worker. A worker who was occupied in the task of ‘fulling’. Fulling is the act of cleansing freshly-woven (but dirty) cloth, of impurities such as aminal-oils, dirt, grit or other gunk, and binding the fibres of the cloth together to make it thicker and stronger. Traditionally, the cloth was woven wool. And traditionally, people employed as fullers were given the privilege (probably) of being allowed as many urinary bathroom breaks as ever they could wish!

Why?

Because fulling used to be done by dumping the cloth into an open tub and then drenching it in gallons of stale piss! The chemicals in human urine (specifically, the ammonia, which gives it that delightful scent) help flush out the impurities in the fabric and binds the fibres of the cloth together to make it stronger. Fortunately, a cleaner method of fulling involving a type of earth (called ‘Fuller’s Clay’), replaced urinal fulling, which in turn, was replaced by a much, much cleaner fulling medium – soap!

Page

As in: Anita Page (American actress).

A ‘page’ is a knight in training. In medieval times, armies had footsoldiers, cavalry, archers and knights. Knights were the elite, specially-trained soldiers who fought on horseback. The training was gruelling to say the least. To become a knight, you went through three stages of training. Starting at age 7, you became a page, apprenticed to a full knight. You would be sent to live with the knight and with the local noble family. Obviously, to do this, your family had to be pretty rich, too.

Because you (or your family) paid for everything. That ‘everything’ included the chainmail, the sword, the shield, the horse and of course, the shining armour. For seven years, a page learnt reading, writing, music, languages, how to behave in a royal or noble court, and then he entered his formal training at the age of 14. From 14 to 21, he was a squire. As a squire, he learnt how to clean, repair, take off, put on, wear and move around in armour. He learnt how to fight on horseback and on foot. He would wear his armour as often as possible to get used to the weight. A suit of armour could weigh upwards of 100 pounds…not including the sword…scabbard…woolen undershirt…chainmail…and shield. If you had proven that you were brave, strong and intelligent enough, or had rendered a suitably courageous service, you would be knighted sometime after your 21st birthday.

Sandler

As in: Adam Sandler (American actor).

Derived from the Hebrew word “Sandlar” – “Sandal-maker” or “Shoemaker”. In times past, a shoemaker was a skilled and valued person. The manufacture of quality footwear was important in times when roads were little more than dirt tracks and most streets were rivers of filth and muck. Then, as now, most shoes were made of leather.

Sawyer

As in: Tom Sawyer (Fictional character created by Mark Twain).

In older times, a ‘sawyer’ was a woodworker. More precisely, he was a…sawyer. A man who worked with a wood-saw to cut long slats of wood (planks!) for people to use in building and the manufacture of furniture and other essential items made of wood (such as carts, gates, fences and so-on). The sawyer profession still exists today, but with the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of steam and water-powered sawmills with enormous automatic saws, it’s not as common as what it once was. Sawyers often worked in pairs because the logs they cut were so large and the massive saws that they used, so incredibly long and heavy.

To saw a plank, a prepared log was placed over a pit and was held in place by wooden beams called ‘dogs’. It’s from here that we get the expressions “top dog” and “underdog”. The ‘top dog’ was the sawyer who was ‘atop the dogs’ or outside the pit, holding the top end of the saw. The ‘underdog’ was the man down in the pit, holding the bottom half of the saw, quite literally ‘under the dogs’. It was the top dog’s job to guide the sawteeth. It was the underdog’s job to apply pressure on the downwards strokes, and to lift the saw on the upwards strokes. He was the underdog in more ways than one, though. All the sawdust that came from the constant abrasion of the sawteeth would fall into the pit and get all over the underdog. Not a pleasant job.

Slater

As in: Christian Slater (American actor).

Related to the thatcher and the tyler (or ’tiler’), the slater was the man who worked specifically with a type of rock…Slate…to tile the rooves of buildings. The characteristics of slate means that it can be split into thin sheets or plates. These plates or ‘shingles’ can then be hammered onto the roof in overlapping layers to create a leakproof roof.

Smith

As in: Dame Maggie Smith (British Actress).

Smith is one of the most common surnames in the world. But what is a ‘Smith’?

A smith was a metalworker. There are many kinds of smiths. Blacksmiths (who worked with iron and steel). Brownsmiths (who worked with copper). Tinsmiths. Silversmiths. Goldsmiths. Locksmiths. The list is almost endless. But almost without exception, a smith was a person who worked in some way with metal. The place where a smith worked, officially called a ‘forge’ was often nicknamed just the ‘Smithy’, as in ‘the village smithy’. The blacksmith is often considered the king of the Smiths…as well as the king of all artisans and workers. The blacksmith was the guy who made the stuff that everyone else used to make stuff with! He made the axes, the swords, the saws, hammers, nails, horseshoes, door-knockers, candleholders, knives, shovels…anything made of metal had to go through his hands first before someone else could use it!

A tinsmith (one of the varieties of smiths) was also called a ‘tinker’: Someone who fiddled around with small, metal household objects (such as pots, pans, ladles and other common household utensils).

But how does something like ‘Smith’ have anything to do with metal? The surname ‘Smith’ comes from the Old English word ‘Smite’. As in to ‘Smite them down!’. To ‘Smite’ someone or something literally meant to hit them. Since half a metalworker’s time is spent in beating the red hot metal to the correct shape before it cools (and becomes too hard to work), the word ‘Smite’ was applied to their professions, which eventually evolved to ‘Smith’, which is still used today.

A lot of our expressions today come from the humble village blacksmith. To ‘Strike while the Iron is Hot’. To go at something ‘Hammer and Tongs’.

Spencer

As in: Lady Diana Spencer (Princess Diana).

The surname ‘Spencer’ is originally of French origin. It comes from the occupation of the ‘Dispencier‘, or the dispenser of provisions. The surname ‘Spencer’ is unique in that it’s probably one of the few surnames that can be traced back to ONE person. That person being Robert d’Abbetot. d’Abbetot followed King William (William the Conquerer) to England during his conquest of the British Isles. His occupation was the royal dispenser (of provisions and materials for William’s armies). As such, his name was listed as “Robert le Dispencier’ (“Robert the Dispenser”). Robert eventually changed his name to that of Robert le Dispensier as opposed to Robert d’Abbetot. Over the following generations, le Dispensier became ‘Dispensier’, then ‘Spensier’ and eventually…’Spencer’.

Tanner

As in: Bill Tanner (Character in the James Bond universe).

A tanner was a processor of leather, the material produced from animal hides. The place in which he would have worked was the tannery. Being a tanner was a terrible and revolting job. For one, it involved stewing the cow-hides in vats of water and dog-droppings! The full tanning process went like this:

1. Stick cow-hides in vats of water and lime (the stuff you make old-style concrete out of, not the stuff that goes in your drink!) Let it soak. This loosens up all the hair on the hide.

2. Remove the hide after two weeks’ soaking. Place the hide on a sloped board while you shave off all the hair and fur with a massive knife.

3. Flip the hide over. Using another big, scary knife, slice and shave away all the fat on the inner-side of the hide.

4. Dunk the entire hide, free of hair, fur and fat, into a huge bath full of dog-doodies and water. Stew and simmer (literally. There would be a fire under the water-and-dog-poo pit to keep things nice and hot) for a few weeks. Let old Fido’s bowel-movements and the bacteria that they contained, work with the water to remove the lime (from Step 1) from the hide and soften up the skin until it’s nice and floppy. Then, remove the hide, hang it and leave it to dry.

All this made the leather nice and soft and pliable. And when you consider all the things that leather was used for back in the old days, this was a horrible, but very necessary job. You needed leather for…shoes, aprons, belts, book-covers, desktops, razor-strops, gloves, bags, boxes…all manner of things!

Tyler

As in: John Tyler (10th President of the United States of America).

The surname ‘Tyler’ comes from the occupation ‘tyler’. Or to be more precise…’Tiler’. As in the guy who installs tiles. In older times, the tyler was the man who repaired or installed rooves (roof-tiles) in villages or towns where rooves were more commonly made of slate shingles, clay tiles or wooden slats. In London, rooves used to be all made of dried grass which was stacked and bundled onto the roof creating a thatched roof. In 1666, the Great Fire burned damn near the entire center of town to ashes. When the city was being rebuilt, Charles II decreed that no buildings were to be built of flammable materials, and certainly not with thatched rooves. Tylers around London must’ve made sacks of gold fulfilling all their orders; over 13,000 buildings were burnt to the ground during the four days the fire lasted.

Webster

As in: John Webster (17th century English playwright).

A webster, webber or weaver was a person who worked with threads or cloth, weaving the strands and threads together to bond them and make fabric. The strips of cloth or fabric stretched across the frames of couches and chairs (which support the padded seat above) is still called ‘webbing’ today.

Wright

As in: Wilbur and Orville Wright (pioneer aviators).

A ‘wright’ was an Old English word for a woodworker. The word ‘wright’ was therefore applied to occupations that traditionally made things out of wood, such as a ‘shipwright’ or a ‘wheelwright’. A builder of boats and a manufacturer of cart and carriage-wheels.

07/12/2011 by scheong

Pearl Harbor: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy

The Second World War is full of “Where were you when…?” moments. Lots of us have asked our grandparents those questions. Where were you when war was declared? Where were you on V.E. Day? Where were you on V.J. Day? Where were you when Churchill became Prime Minister or when Italy surrendered or when the A. bombs were dropped on Japan? Today is the 7th of December, 2011. It’s 70 years to the day since the events of the date which would live in infamy, took place at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. So, what happened on that day? What caused it? Why did it happen? What was life like before it happened? What was life like after it happened? This was a world-shaking event that shocked almost everyone in the world, but what made the 7th of December such a date of infamy?

Let’s find out together.

What is ‘Pearl Harbor’?

Pearl Harbor is a naval base belonging to the United States Navy. It gets the name ‘Pearl Harbor’ from the Hawaiian words ‘Wai Momi‘, or ‘Pearl Water’, which was the name of the area where the base was eventually built in the late 1800s. ‘Pearl Harbor’ originally went by a number of less poetic names. Among them were “Naval Station, Honolulu”, and “Naval Station, Hawaii”. Originally little more than a coaling-station (the seafaring equivalent of a pit-stop or a roadside diner), serious military interest in the area of the harbor started at the turn of the last century around 1899. By 1903, the base’s name was officially called ‘Pearl Harbor’. A new community to serve the growing naval base (‘Pearl City’) was established nearby in 1911. The naval base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was, and remains, the United States’ main naval base off its western coast.

The United States, 1941

The contention that America joined the Second World War merely to show off, flex its muscles, beat the Axis, take all the credit for the victory and stiff everyone else is a popular one on internet discussion-forums and YouTube video comments-lists.

But it’s not true.

The United States never had any intention of trying to outperform any other of the allied countries. It never attempted to try and win total victory. It never entered the war at its own convenience just ‘because’. What most people tend to forget, over seventy years after the start of the Second World War, was that the United States actually wanted nothing to do with the European conflict.

In the eyes of American politicians and the American public, and as evidenced by popular opinion polls in the “Why We Fight” 1940s series of documentary films produced by the United States Army, America wanted no part in any future wars. A fact that might amuse, confuse and surprise many people today.

The United States in the 1930s and 40s was initially at least, extremely isolationist. It didn’t join the Great War (now more commonly called World War One) until 1917. And that was a disaster. After surviving the bloody trenches of France, American doughboys were determined not to get themselves mixed up in another European war. As far as they were concerned, the English, the French, the Germans, the Italians and the Russians could play fisticuffs until the cows came home and America was going to pay absolutely no attention at all.

Or at least, that was the plan.

One of the biggest anti-war, anti-involvement and pro-isolationism supporters was a prominent American celebrity of the 1930s, a famous aviator called Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Famous for flying across the Atlantic Ocean nonstop in his airplane ‘The Spirit of St. Louis’, Lindbergh became even more famous as an outspoken supporter of American isolationism. So famous and so outspoken in fact, that when war finally was declared, Lindbergh’s previously almost legendary reputation was severely damaged.

Despite the official stance of neutrality, it’s often said that nobody is ever truly neutral, and the United States supported Great Britain in almost any way that it could apart from giving outright military support. And up until 1941, this remained the fullest extent of American involvement in World War Two.

Southeast Asia, 1941

The Far East was in turmoil in 1941. The Second Sino-Japanese War between the Chinese and the Japanese had been raging since 1937. By now, Japan controlled vast swathes of Chinese land and the Chinese National Revolutionary Army was in full retreat with little hope of foreign aid. Feeling invincible, the Japanese Imperial Army, Navy and Air Force wanted to conquer all of Asia. It would take everything that wasn’t nailed down or defended to the death, but those two small inconveniences wouldn’t stop them, either.

But, to take such enormous amounts of land in the Southwest Pacific, the Japanese required naval superiority. The powerful Royal Navy of Great Britain, which had dominated the seas since the early Georgian era in the 1700s, was elsewhere engaged in 1941, but there was still one force to be reckoned with. The United States Navy. No Japanese actions in the Pacific could go ahead with the United States Navy protecting American holdings in the Pacific. If the Japanese intended to dominate Asia, they first had to neutralise the American threat. They had to destroy Pearl Harbor.

American Reactions

America was under no illusions about the threat of the Japanese. It was one of the fastest growing countries in the world at the time, changing rapidly from a backwards society of feudalism and agriculture, to a powerful modern force that adopted Western teachings and technology with surprising swiftness. With Japanese actions in China in the 1930s, the United States began to fear quite rightly for its own safety. In the years and months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, American-Japanese relations began a serious deterioration. In 1940, America, which had previously supplied Japan with raw resources and military hardware, stopped all such shipments to Japan. It was hoped that, without American aid, the Japanese war-effort in the Pacific would die out and fizzle away. But it didn’t.

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. October, 1941

In a show of force, then-president of the U.S.A., the famous Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ordered the United States fleet then at-anchor in San Diego, to relocate to Pearl Harbor. The purpose of this was to scare and intimidate the Japanese into calling off their attacks. America was now within striking-distance of Japan and if Japan didn’t play nice, the country with a former president who said that one should talk softly and carry a big stick, was going to bring that stick smack-down on Japanese heads. But Japan didn’t listen.

In July, 1941, the Americans stopped exporting oil to Japan in another attempt to starve and coerce the Japanese into ending their conflict, but this too, failed to intimidate the Japanese. The Americans were running out of options.

The Attack on Pearl Harbor

By mid-1941, American patience with the Japanese was wearing out, and Japanese aggression was heating up. The Japanese wanted more and the Americans weren’t giving it. The Japanese would have to take the resources that they needed for their war by force, and for that to happen, America had to be dealt with in the most direct way possible: An open military attack on its naval base at Pearl Harbor.

The Naval base at Taranto on the Italian coast, in the 1930s

By this time, the Japanese were planning the attack on Pearl Harbor. To learn about strategic aerial bombardment, the Japanese studied the recent Battle of Taranto, in which the British attacked the Italian naval base of Taranto in the Mediterranean back in November of 1940. The attack was a success for the British, who wreaked significant damaged on the Italian base with only minimal losses.

The Japanese practiced their raids on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor relentlessly. They ‘bombed’ a model of the harbor repeatedly in the months and weeks leading up to the attack until their hit-rate had reached an accuracy of 80%. On the 26th of November, 1941, the Japanese set sail from their home ports. To totally annihilate the Americans, their task-force was equipped with:

Six aircraft-carriers, two battleships, two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, nine destroyers, eight tankers for refuelling, twenty-eight submarines (five of which were midgets) and 414 airplanes.

During the journey to Hawaii, the Japanese maintained radio-silence (abstaining from the use of radio in case their signals might be detected by the Americans) to hide their position from the enemy.

December 7th, 1941

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a complete and total surprise.

Although the Japanese had intended to formally declare war on the United States prior to the attack, the declaration never reached the U.S. Government in time and by the time it had, the attack had already started. It commenced at 7:53am on the morning of December 7th, 1941.

Because of radio silence, the Japanese were able to get extremely close to Hawaii and Pearl Harbor before unleashing their attack. The first wave of Japanese airplanes, comprising of ninety bombers armed with torpedoes and bombs, fifty-four dive-bombers, each equipped with 500lb general-purpose bombs, and forty-five of Japan’s famous Mitsubishi ‘Zero’ fighter-planes. Their targets were battleships, airfields, airplanes and aircraft-carriers.

The purpose of the first wave was to attack and destroy as much of the important infrastructure and military equipment as they could which was stationed at Pearl Harbor. Ships. Planes. Airfields. Hangars. Fuel and ammunition-dumps. Shortly after, the second wave took off. Their task was to destroy anything that the first wave had missed.

The second wave comprised of bombers, dive-bombers and fighters. 171 in total. Their targets included aircraft carriers, hangars, cruisers and aircraft, with the fighter-planes (again, Japanese Zeros) providing air-superiority.

U.S.S. Shaw explodes after her forward magazine is hit

The third wave of Japanese planes, which were designed to finish off Pearl Harbor, never took flight. By this time, it was feared that the Americans would have ammassed some sort of defense to intercept the third wave and that the element of surprise had been lost. Indeed, the growing American defense was wreaking havoc on the second wave and sending in additional Japanese reinforcements would’ve proven a waste of manpower and machinery.

The American Response

To say that America was caught off-guard by the Japanese attack is an understatement. They had absolutely no idea that any such attack was imminent. While American radar-stations on Hawaii had picked up on Japanese airplanes (scouts which had been sent ahead of the main attack-force), they were presumed to be American fighter-planes returning from a scheduled training-exercise. No significance was attached to their presence in the area.

At the time, American sailors and airmen were asleep in their barracks and bunks, blissfully unaware of everything that was going on. It wasn’t until the first bombs dropped and the sounding of a general alarm that the base realised it was under attack. And in the meantime, Pearl Harbor was a sitting duck.

Warships in Pearl Harbor were set up in neat rows alongside the docks. The famous “Battleship Row”. Clustering ships together like this made them a big, fat red target to the Japanese. It was impossible to miss them. In addition, few of the artillery pieces and machine-guns on Pearl Harbor were loaded or manned at the time of the attack. Ammunition was stored in locked ammunition-cages and lockers which the defending Americans had trouble accessing during the raid, delaying the speed of any counter-attack.

For fears of sabotage if their airplanes were kept locked in their hangars (“out of sight, out of mind”), American airplanes were instead parked on the tarmacs, outside their hangars in rows, where they would be easily visible (to deter tampering by enemy agents). This clustering of airplanes, just like with the ships, merely presented a big fat target to the Japanese, who decimated American airfields.

American battleships were woefully unprepared for any enemy attack. With guns unloaded and ammunition stored in locked bunkers and lockers far from their guns, much time was wasted in attempting to load guns with the correct ammunition to launch a successful response to the Japanese.

At the time, the Americans had 402 aircraft stationed on Hawaii. Of those, nearly half (188) were destroyed outright by the Japanese. Another 159 were damaged beyond immediate use. This left a mere 55 planes available to fight off a Japanese airborn force of 353 out of a total of 414 airplanes. Of those, only eight managed to get into the air.

The Aftermath

The attack was surprisingly swift. From when it started at 7:53am, it was all over in about two hours, ending at 9:55. The damage wrought by the Japanese was significant.

Eight battleships (Arizona, Oklahoma, California, West Virginia, Nevada, Tennessee, Maryland and Pennsylvania) were targeted. Three were sunk, one capsized, one beached. The rest sustained relatively minor damage. The biggest disaster was the U.S.S. Arizona. When it sank, it took 1,177 men with it. Today, it is the Arizona Memorial. Along with the eight battleships, one training ship was struck along with three destroyers and three cruisers, which received relatively minor damage. A minelayer, a repair-ship and a seaplane tender were also hit during the attack but also received only minor damage.

The attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,402 Americans, against 64 Japanese killed. Nearly half of the 2,402 Americans who died (1,177) were killed when the U.S.S. Arizona was hit, exploded and sunk.

December 7th, 1941 is a big date in history. Not just because of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but because of the huge Japanese offensive that happened soon afterwards. Within hours of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked almost every other country in the southeast Asia region. The countries that the Japanese attacked included British Malaya, Hong Kong, Wake Island, the Philippines, Guam and the International Settlement in Shanghai, China.

However, the biggest impact of December 7th was, undoubtedly, the entry of the United States of America into the Second World War, a conflict which it had previously attempted to remain out of, and only supporting its ally, Great Britain through economic aid. Overnight, public feeling in the United States swung the other way and by the next afternoon, America was at war with Japan, Germany and Italy.

The Infamy Speech

On the afternoon of December 8th, 1941, one of the most historic and important speeches of the 20th century was broadcast across the United States, live. It was the address to the United States Congress given by then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Today, it’s best known as the “Infamy Speech”. The name of the speech (and the title of this posting) comes from the speech’s opening lines.

The speech was delivered at 12:30pm (a half-hour after midday) on the 8th of December, 1941 by the President of the United States. Within a half-hour of the speech being given, the U.S. Congress voted ‘YES’ to going to war with Japan.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Declaration of War against Japan

The text of the Infamy Speech is transcribed below, from the original broadcast:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And, while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island.
And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.
As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense, that always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.

I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

25/11/2011 by scheong

The History of the Collared Shirt

The shirt is probably the most common item ever worn by man and any well-dressed man is likely to have several of them in many colours and styles. But where does the shirt come from and how has this simple garment evolved over time?

Where Does the Shirt Come From?

The modern shirt that a typical man wears on an almost daily basis is a garment that dates back into the Middle Ages and before. Exactly when it was invented is unknown. Most shirts were cheap and handmade at home out of wool, but by the 1300s, men started looking for people who made shirts for a living. It was at this time that the shirtmaker started to rise in European cities, manufacturing comfortable shirts out of cotton, silk and linen. These shirts felt much better against the skin than ordinary wool and the demand for comfort meant that the shirt began to spread around the world. The basic shirt remained the same for centuries, as it does today. It was the components of the shirt that changed with the times.

The Rise of the Shirt

Originally, all shirts, as with all other garments, were handmade. If you wanted a shirt, you went to a shirtmaker, just like if you wanted shoes, you went to a cobbler, and a tailor for your suits. In the 1700s and the 1800s, the rise of the Industrial Revolution meant that shirts could now be mass-produced cheaply from cotton, mostly grown in the Deep South of the United States of America and sent to cotton-mills in the nothern states, or to England and Europe. While the shirt’s popularity spread, its status remained the same.

A Social History of the Shirt

These days, it’s common for men to show off their shirts. You wear a shirt open-collared with a pair of trousers or jeans. Or you open the front of your jacket to show off your shirt. Or you wear a waistcoat but ditch the jacket, to show off your shirtsleeves. Or you might spend fifteen minutes trying to figure out whether or not a particular tie goes with a particular shirt. However, this trend of showing off your shirt as an item of ‘designer fashion’ and style is actually a pretty modern one. Prior to the second quarter of the 1900s, good manners dictated that you never showed your shirt in public. At all. Not the back, the front, the sleeves and certainly not the shirttails. Why? Because the shirt, like your briefs or your boxer-shorts, was considered an item of underwear, a frame of mind that had existed for centuries before.

Because the humble shirt was, for centuries, relegated to and given the same level of decency as your lucky boxer-shorts with the picture of the ‘Blasting Zone’ roadsign on the back, a typical shirt was rarely washed. While today it’s common for a man to change his shirts every couple of days, prior to the end of the First World War, most men wore shirts for much longer intervals. It wasn’t uncommon for one shirt to be worn for two days. Three days. A week. Two weeks. Sometimes even a month…or more. Don’t forget that the modern washing-machine hasn’t been around for very long. Before its invention, the family wash was an event that took several days of boiling, soaking, soaping, scrubbing, beating, rinsing, scrubbing, rinsing, mangling, drying, ironing, starching and folding. Because of the effort and time required to do a single load of laundry, which could take up to a week, men were eager to wear their shirts for as long as possible and to only wash them when it was absolutely necessary. And because of this, the shirt was naturally kept hidden from public scrutiny as much as possible.

Anyone who’s done a lot of work in a shirt and worn it for a while and then had to handwash it, will know that a shirt’s collar and cuffs can turn black from the accumulation of grime, sweat and skin-flakes that comes away from the human body during the course of the day. With the majority of a man’s shirt hidden by a waistcoat and jacket or a sweater or some other suitable overgarment, it wasn’t necessary to change it until it was absolutely essential. But the exposed parts of the shirt – the collar and cuffs, which could become filthy after just one day’s heavy use, would naturally have to be changed on a regular basis, since this was something that couldn’t be hidden from the public eye.

Collar Studs…

…and how they’re used

Collars and Cuffs

To combat the problem of infrequent and long wash-days, early shirts came with detachable collars and cuffs, not something found on most shirts today. While a shirt was worn for days or weeks on end, the collars and cuffs were changed and replaced as necessary, perhaps once a week, or more, if needed. The collars and cuffs on shirts were held on with special buttons called studs. There were two studs for the collar (front and back) and additional studs for the cuffs (one stud for each sleeve). While most people are familiar with all manner of cuffs, from one-button, two-button, convertible cuffs and the variations of the French cuff (for which cufflinks must be worn), detachable shirt-collars have largely slipped from the public consciousness. Here’s some of the more common collars…

Wing Collar

The wing-collar, so-called because of the two ‘wings’ at the front, is popularly associated with the turn of the last century. Wing-collars are typically worn with more formal attire, such as White Tie, but they were also popular everyday collars. This particular type of collar retained its unique shape thanks to copius amounts of starch used in the ironing process that helped the collar stay stiff, even in the hottest, soggiest weather. As you may have guessed, the wing-collar doesn’t fold down. So if you’re going to wear one, you better know how to tie a good necktie or bowtie, because any imperfections in the knot will be extremely visible.

Eton Collar

Named for the prestigeous Eton College in the United Kingdom, the broad Eton Collar has been a part of the school’s uniform since the 1800s.

Spear-Point Collar

The spear-point collar was popular in the United States during the first half of the 20th century, distinguished by its excessively long, pointed collar-tips.

Club Collar

Popular during the Victorian era and well into the early 20th century prior to the Second World War, was the club collar. Unlike the other collars shown so far, the club collar has rounded collar-points.

Clerical Collar

This flat collar is the one traditionally worn by members of the clergy (hence its name), such as priests, vicars, and pastors. It was invented in the mid-1800s by the Rev. Dr. Donald McLeod of Scotland, and by the late 19th century, had become a common part of clerical attire.

Imperial Collar

The Imperial collar was another popular collar of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This was one of the more extreme collars of the era and could be upwards of two or three inches wide. This could make it a bit uncomfortable to wear and probably thankfully, it was considered a formal collar, only to be worn on special occasions.

Because a man could have a wide variety and large number of collars in his wardrobe, they were often stored in leather collar-boxes such as this one:

While some collars were soft and floppy, others, particularly the nonfolding rigid ones such as the Wing collar and the Imperial collar, were treated extensively with laundry starch to help them keep their shape (as well as making them easier to clean).

Detachable shirt-cuffs also existed and like with collars, they were often treated with starch to make them stiff so that they would hold their shape. As mentioned earlier, cuffs were held onto a man’s shirtsleeves with cuff-studs. A pair of detachable cuffs are shown below:

The two buttonholes at the tops of the cuffs accomodated the cuff-studs. The two other buttonholes further down existed for the use of cufflinks.

A big manufacturer of mens’ shirts, collars and cuffs was Cluett, Peabody & Co. of Troy in New York State, U.S.A. They popularised the famous ‘Arrow’ brand of collars which were popular from the early 1900s up to the early 1930s. The Arrow collar lives on today in the lyrics of the Irving Berlin song ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz‘ (“…High hats and Arrow collars, white spats and lots of dollars…”).

Shirtsleeves

Apart from early shirts having removable and adjustable collars and cuffs, they also had adjustable shirtsleeves.

Early shirts came in one size. Extra large. Don’t forget that, because the shirt was considered an undergarment, no thought was given to its fit on a man’s body, since nobody was ever likely to see it. Shirts were sized roughly according to neck circumfrence and shoulder-width, but everything else was measured and made to be as accomodating as possible. This included shirtsleeves. Prior to the arrival of the modern shirt that we know today, shirtsleeves were all made and measured to be extra-long. This way, they would fit the largest man in comfort.

But what happened if you weren’t the largest man? What happened if, instead of being Robert Wadlow (8ft 11in), you were instead James Madison, who towered over ants at a staggering 5ft 4in.? Obviously, shirtsleeves would be too long. And if you weren’t able to find a shirtmaker, or as was more likely the case, weren’t rich enough to get a shirtmaker to custom-measure your sleeves, then what did you do?

Most men utilised these things:

Forever associated with bartenders, writers, banker-tellers and barbershop quartets, there was a time where almost every well-dressed man owned at least one pair of these things and kept them on his dressing-table. They’re called sleeve-garters. Made of elastic material (or in this case, springy steel), sleeve-garters were worn on a man’s shirtsleeves, just above the elbow. They worked by holding back the extra sleeve-material that would otherwise cascade down a man’s arms and prevent his hands from doing any useful work. They were also handy for holding a man’s shirtsleeves back if he was doing heavy work and didn’t want to get his sleeves and cuffs dirty.

Thanks to the modern, made-to-measure, off-the-rack shirt, sleeve-garters aren’t as often used as once they were. However, you can still buy them (they’re usually very cheap) and if ever you have a shirt you like but which you can’t wear on account of the sleeves being too long, you might want to break out grandpa’s sleeve-garters and slap them on. They can still come in handy.

The Modern Shirt

The shirt with detachable collars and cuffs died out during the interwar period and the shirt which we know today was born. With improvements in washing and cleaning clothes and the introduction of the first washing-machines in the 1920s, clothing could now be washed faster and more frequently. Public demand for shirts with detachable collars and cuffs gradually died away during the 1930s and by the middle of the century were more or less ancient history. Cloth-rationing during the Second World War probably played a significant part in their demise, since it would’ve been difficult to find the extra cloth needed for detachable collars and cuffs.

You can still buy shirt-collars and cuffs (either brand new or vintage) as well as collar-studs, shirt-studs and collarless shirts today, although understandably, they are much rarer than the shirts that most people have today. They’re still manufactured for formalwear, or for people seeking an authentic period look in their wardrobe for any variety of reasons from a desire for vintage style, historical reenacting or sheer convenience and comfort. Collar-boxes can still be found cheaply at antiques stores and flea-markets.

22/11/2011 by scheong

Fountain Pens and Flexible Nibs

Ballpoint pens are boring.

There. I said it.

One of the reasons why I love fountain pens is because of the variety that surrounds them. You have pens made of gold, of rubber, of wood, of steel, of silver, of plastics of various kinds, you have steel nibs and gold nibs of all kinds of writing styles and characteristics. You have all kinds of inks and filling-mechanisms and sizes and styles. Somewhere out there, is the fountain pen for you.

And perhaps you’re already out there looking for that fountain pen just for you. And perhaps you’ve been looking on websites or forums or online photo-galleries to find the best pen for you. And perhaps you’ve become interested in nibs. But not just any nib. A flexible nib. And maybe you just want to know a bit more about this curiosity of writing before deciding whether or not it’s really for you. That’s what this posting is here to do.

What is a Flexible Nib?

A flexible nib is…a…flexible…nib.

Okay that’s the short story.

The long story is that a flexible nib is a nib that bends, spreads and flexes according to the amount of pressure that the user applies to the pen. The more pressure, the more flex. Less pressure, less flex. Press down and the tines of the nib spread apart. Ease your force and the tines spring back together. Easy. That is a flex nib in a nutshell.

Why do we Want Flex Nibs?

Flex nibs are desirable for a number of reasons, although granted, they’re not for everyone. Flex-nibs are prized by people who like line-variation in their writing, by people who practice calligraphy (particularly styles like Roundhand) or people who just want a bit of fun in their writing. Flex-nibs are also handy for illustrators and artists who require line-variation in their art, such as comic-book writers and cartoonists.

I want a flex nib but…I can’t find any!

Unfortunately for the population at large, fountain pens with flexible nibs are, on a whole, no longer manufactured. In fact, they haven’t been manufactured in mainstream fountain pens for a while now. If you’re after a fountain pen with a flexible nib, for the best results, you’re almost certainly going to have to hunt for vintage pens, preferrably before ca. 1930 (or at least before the 1950s). Fountain pens with flexible nibs were particularly popular in the years between 1880 to about 1930, but their manufacture and use died away gradually since then until now they’re hardly manufactured at all. Many fountain pens made during the first two decades of the 20th century are famous for their flexible nibs and many pen companies were famous for making pens with flexible nibs. Companies such as Swan, Conway-Stewart, Wahl-Eversharp, Waterman and Conklin.

Where did Flex Nibs Come From?

Flex nibs or flex pens have a long history and they started with the quills of the Middle Ages. Quills, which were the long, flight-feathers of birds (usually geese), were prepared for writing by being de-barbed (having their frilly bits cut off), being heated and dried, and then by being cut into pen-points.

Repeated dipping in ink meant that over time, the pen-points would become soft and flexible. Writers who enjoyed this quality let their quills stay nice and soft and flexy until such time that the quill-points got so soft that they’d just break (at which point, the broken point was cut off and a new quill was cut out of the remaining feather-shaft).

When steel dip-pens started replacing quills en-masse in the 1830s, writers were so used to flexible quills that factories often manufactured steel pens with flexible points so that writers would have something more familiar between their fingers.

In the early 1900s when fountain pens began to replace dip-pens, pen-manufacturers kept flexible gold fountain pen nibs as a writing holdover from the dip-pen era.

In the 1930s and 40s, as the fountain pen became more and more popular, flexible nibs were found to be unsuitable for the office environment, where pressing a pen-nib through paper and carbon-paper meant that stronger, stiffer nibs were required. After that time, flex nibs started being manufactured less and less, and finally died out after ballpoint pens started rising to prominence in the 1960s. Today, flex nibs…true flex nibs…are rare in the modern fountain pen market. Most people who want flex generally buy antique pens, or else buy cheap, steel dip-pens (which generally have flexible properties on a much lower price-level than antique fountain pens which can cost hundreds of dollars).

Using a Flex Nib

Flex nibs are not for everyone. Because they haven’t, for the most part, been manufactured for the past several decades, public knowledge of flex nibs is low. By that I mean, the average person on the street is unlikely to have ever seen one or used one. So, is a flex nib for you? It might be, it might not be.

Using a flex nib requires a light touch. Yes, all fountain pens require a light touch, but this is especially true with flex nibs (and the more flexible the nib, the lighter the touch). Someone transitioning from a ballpoint pen to a fountain pen should get used to using a regular, stiff-nibbed fountain pen first before unleashing themselves on a flex-nibbed pen and all the uncertainties that can come with it.

It’s important to know the limitations of a flex-nib. No two flex nibs are exactly the same and there are varying levels of flex. They range from superflex (also called ‘Wet Noodles’), to full-flex and semi-flex. Superflex nibs which will bend at the lightest of touches are especially common with older pens from the turn of the last century. The majority of pens are full-flex or semi-flex. If you want to experiment with flex-nib pens and aren’t sure whether or not you can handle trying to write with a pen that’s going to jump and down like a pogo-stick, you might want to start with a more forgiving semi-flex pen. These pens will only flex a small amount, compared with say, a 1900 Waterman which would have nib-tines that literally flex like wet noodles.

If you want to experiment with flexible nibs but don’t want to fork out $200+ for an antique Parker that you might only ever use once, when you figure out that flex really isn’t for you…then what do you do?

A lot of people ask this question. “How can I fiddle with flex on a fluff?”

The answer is easy. Go to your local arts and crafts shop or arts-supply shop or fancy paperie or your local pen-shop, and purchase some steel dip-pens and a pen-holder. Even modern dip-pens (but especially older ones) can be significantly flexible. Once you’ve got the hang of preparing the pen, then you can learn to write with it and see if writing with a flex-nib is for you. Think of the dip-pens as the cheap, training-wheels, free-sample alternative to blowing big bucks on antique flex-nib fountain pen. A small stash of flexible steel nibs and a pen-holder might cost $20 (okay, a bit more if you need to buy the ink as well), and it’s a small price to pay for trying out something totally new. Plus, if you break the pen-nib, you won’t cry.

Most importantly when learning how to use flex-nibs is to know how much pressure to place on the pen when writing. A really flexible nib will require almost no pressure at all to write a line a quarter-inch wide. Semi-flex nibs might require a somewhat heavier hand to produce a similar result. Not knowing the limits and capabilities of the flexible qualities of flexible nibs can lead to the nibs being broken or sprung (where the nibs have been pressed down so hard that the tines don’t spring back together when you ease off the pressure). Sprung nibs can be repaired and hammered flat again, but it’s a fiddly, messy process that’s best avoided to begin with.

What are Flex Nibs Made Of?

The vast majority of flex-nibs (for fountain pens, at least) are made of gold. The soft properties of gold make it ideal for nibs of different levels of flex. Dip-pen nibs which contain flexible properties, on the other hand, are generally made of steel. Steel can be a little harder to work when making and using a flex-nib, but it’s cheaper and easier to mass produce for throwaway dip-pens.

20/11/2011 by Scheong

The House of the Dragon Throne: Imperial China and the Forbidden City

China has not had an easy history. In the last one hundred years, China has gone from a monarchy to a capitalist, democratic republic to a communist state. China has seen great changes and turmoils. It has seen wars, famine, revolution, disease, infighting and upheaval. But what do we think of when we think of Chinese history? We think of Emperors, Empresses, princes, princesses, big, fancy houses, fine furniture, paddyfields, baggy robes, pigtails, chopsticks, incense, Taoism and the millions of Chinese peasantry.

But what was China really like back when the Chinese Empire still existed?

China: A Land of Empire

China has had a long history of tens of thousands of years and over a dozen dynasties and smaller kingdoms ruling over it, all fighting for power and control. China is a massive country and controlling the entire nation is an ambitious undertaking. For centuries, kings, armies and emperors fought each other and at various points in Chinese history, the country was united, divided, united, divided, united and divided yet again, as kings, emperors and generals fought for control. To try and cover over four thousand years of Chinese history in one article is far too ambitious…so I won’t. Let’s take a more general view of Imperial China and look at the parts of China that have entered the public, global image of China.

The Chinese Emperor and the Mandate of Heaven

In older times, China was ruled by an emperor, as were most Asian countries, such as the current Emperor of Japan. In China, the Emperor was seen as a demigod, appointed by the Chinese gods to be their representative on earth. Think of it as the Chinese equivalent of the Western belief of the ‘Divine Right of Kings’.

The Emperor held absolute power over all of China (provided of course, it was all of China that he controlled at the time of his reign). His right to this power came from the ancient belief of the Mandate of Heaven, similar to the above concept of the Divine Right of Kings in Western monarchies. In its essence, the Mandate of Heaven, according to traditional Confucian teachings, stated that so long as an incumbent emperor was reasonable, kind, just and merciful towards the commoners, he would retain the right to rule. If his rule became objectionable in any way and remained so until it became intolerable, it was the right of the people to overthrow the emperor and his dynasty and establish a new one. If the emperor was successfully overthrown and defeated, the common people would take it as a sign that the emperor had displeased the gods and had therefore, lost their blessing and protection, which meant that the blessing of the gods would transfer to the next dynasty to be established.

And this was the essence of Chinese dynastic imperial rule for centuries.

According to research of ancient Chinese documents, the Mandate of Heaven has existed ever since it was put to paper by Zhou Gongdan, brother to the first emperor of the Zhou Dynasty (established 1045 B.C). The original documents as written by Duke Zhou Gongdan, outline the eight main points of the traditional Mandate of Heaven, as was followed by every ruler of China since then for the next two thousand years. In essence, they state that:

1. The Right to Rule China is Granted by Heaven.
2. There will only be ONE ruler of China at any one time.
3. The right of the Emperor to Rule is based on his good conduct and his being the earthly representative of Heaven.
4. While the Mandate of Heaven is maintained, dynastic rule (father-to-son) is allowed. Failure to maintain the Mandate will result in the loss of the right to dynastic rule.

With these four main rules of the Mandate of Heaven came the four corresponding implications or conditions:

5. The ruling family of China must be seen as legitimate by the People of China.
6. If China is ruled by more than one family or person, the family or person that puts forward a legitimate claim to the Mandate must be able to justify it to the people of China.
7. Rulers are responsible for their own behaviour and must make the welfare of the Chinese people their first priority.
8. Rulers of China should always be mindful of revolutions. A revolution would indicate the displeasure of the people and therefore, the loss of the Mandate of Heaven.

If you read the Terms and Conditions of the Mandate of Heaven, you may notice that it doesn’t mention anything about noble birth. Noble birth is not (and never was) a condition of rulership over China, in contrast to rulership of contemporary Western monarchies. In theory, any man could become ruler of China. Of course, the men with the best chance of ruling China were those who were already close to the emperor, men like advisors, ministers and prominent royal officials.

The Imperial Examination

You might not believe it, but becoming part of the governing class of Imperial China was not as difficult as it might seem.

In ancient times, the only way to get into the Chinese Government was to ‘know the right people’.People gained access to the administrative bureaucracy by being recommended for vacancies by current bureaucrats or by prominent Chinese noblemen. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty established an examination system during his reign (141 B.C. – 87 B.C.) based on Confucian teachings. Any man could apply for these examinations if he could pay the fees and had the necessary education. Applicants or students who passed the examinations would be given posts in the Imperial Bureaucracy. From there, it was just a matter of getting promoted until you got high enough in the imperial ladder to hopefully one day, become emperor. The Imperial Examination was a part of Chinese life until the fall of Imperial China centuries later.

The Forbidden City

The most famous (and the largest) remnant and symbol of Imperial China and the Chinese Emperor: The Forbidden City in Beijing, China.

Despite what you might think, the Forbidden City was not the first palace to house the Emperor of China. In fact, the Forbidden City was not built until the second emperor of the Ming Dynasty came along. The emperor’s father, the first emperor (and founder) of the Ming Dynasty moved the Chinese capital from Peking to Nanking (what are Beijing and Nanjing today) during his reign. When his son, the Yongle Emperor came to the throne, he moved the Chinese capital back to Beijing and in 1406, ordered the start of construction of a grand new imperial residence that would eventually become known as the ‘Zijincheng‘, or the ‘Purple Forbidden City’ (In China, as was also the case in contemperous Western monarchies, purple was the colour of monarchy. Why? Because purple dye was notoriously difficult to make, and therefore extremely expensive, which meant that only kings and emperors could afford it). In time, the structure just became known as the ‘Forbidden City’.

The Forbidden City took fifteen years to build. It holds the Guiness Record as being the largest palace complex on earth. From the completion of its construction until the fall of Imperial China, it was the seat of power for the Chinese Emperor.

The Forbidden City gets its name quite simply because commoners were forbidden to enter its walls. The only people allowed inside were the Emperor’s family, government officials, servants, courtiers and of course…the Imperial eunuchs.

Eunuchs have a long history in China. They ranged from prisoners of war to men found guilty of the crime of rape (or any other crime for which castration was the punishment) and men who became slaves were also turned into eunuchs. But most famously, eunuchs were employed in their thousands by the Imperial household to act as servants to the emperor and his family. Since eunuchs were incapable of having sex, they were unable to establish their own families (and by extension, their own dynasties) which might threaten the power and position of the emperor, which was the main justification behind the employment of eunuchs by the Imperial court.

The Peculiarities of the Palace

The imperial palace, the great Forbidden City in Beijing, was (and remains) unlike almost any other palace complex in the world. To begin with, it is the largest palace complex in the world. It has hundreds of buildings and miles of walls, dozens of watchtowers, acres of courtyards, gardens and several enormous gates. The walls and gates divided the palace and servants, courtiers, officials and members of the imperial family were strictly segregated. Only certain people were allowed in the innermost areas of the palace grounds and buildings where the emperor lived with his family. In total, the palace has 9,999 rooms. This was considered good luck because the Chinese word for ‘nine’, ‘Jiu‘, is pronounced the same way as the Chinese word meaning ‘long-lasting’.

Because a number of the buildings in the palace were made of wood, there are several enormous cauldrons placed around the various palace courtyards. The cauldrons were used to collect rainwater which would then be used to put out fires in an emergency.

Despite the palace’s enormous size, because it was also designed as a fortress, there are only four gates into the main complex, and a fifth gate (the Gate of Supreme Harmony) that leads to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the structure used by the emperor on his wedding-day and on special occasions. Because of the hall’s general inaccessibility, it was impractical to use it on a regular basis when the emperor would hold court. So, although this was officially one of the hall’s intended purposes, it was rarely occupied for this use. The Hall of Supreme Harmony is also the location of the ‘Dragon Throne’ mentioned in the title of this article. The Dragon Throne was the official seat (literally) of the Emperor of China.

Colours play an important part in Chinese culture, and some colours held special significance in the Chinese Imperial Court.

Red was the colour of happiness.

Purple was officially the colour of the Emperor of China himself, although he might also wear robes that were dyed yellow instead.

Gold or Yellow was the colour of the Imperial Family. In imperial times, only members of the Imperial Family were allowed to wear yellow or own objects coloured in yellow.

An interesting fact is that the floor of the Hall of Supreme Harmony is laid with golden bricks to symbolise the Imperial Family and the emperor. Okay, that’s not quite right. Yes, the floor of the hall is made up of bricks. But no, they don’t actually contain any gold. They get their name ‘golden bricks’ because the bricks (fired in the imperial kiln), took an incredibly long time to make. Because they took so long and were so difficult to make, each brick was considered to be worth it’s weight in gold (and probably cost just as much!), hence the name ‘golden bricks’.

The Last Emperor

The Chinese Empire lasted for centuries. But it could not last forever. And it couldn’t last in the 20th century.

The Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion of the late 19th century caused great instability in China. The last dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, was becoming increasingly unpopular with ordinary Chinese citizens…probably because it wasn’t Chinese.

That’s right. A Chinese dynasty that wasn’t Chinese. How is this possible?

The Qing Dynasty just sounds so…Chinese…doesn’t it?

Well, that was the whole point. To make it sound as Chinese as possible. That way, hopefully, people would forget the dynasty’s other name: The Manchu Dynasty.

The Manchu Dynasty got its name from where its people originated from, a geographic region northeast of China, then called ‘Manchuria’. But how does this differ from the rest of China and how do its people differ from the rest of the Chinese population?

Well, up until the mid-1600s, China had always been ruled by a Han emperor. That is to say, it was ruled by an emperor who came from amongst the Han people, the Han being the main ethnic group in China (this is why the Chinese language is called ‘Hanyu‘ or the ‘Han Language’, and the Chinese people are called ‘Hanren‘ or the ‘Han People’ in their native tongue).

But in the early-1600s, all this changed and Manchu people from the north of what is now part of China, invaded Beijing. To the ordinary Chinese people, they saw the Manchus as being foreigners and not part of the China or the Chinese people which they knew. They were not Han people and were therefore considered outsiders. But the Han seized power in the 1640s and remained in power, founding the ‘Qing Dynasty’ to make themselves sound ‘more Chinese’.

The Chinese people, who had been growing more and more displeased with the Qing Dynasty, were itching for a chance to abolish the monarchy and found a new government: A western-stye democractic republic.

In 1908, the aged and extremely bad-tempered Empress Dowager, Cixi, died of old age. She had ruled China as it’s empress for nearly fifty years after the death of her husband. When she died at the age of 72, the last emperor of China inherited the throne.

He was not a powerful man. He was not an authoratative man.

He was not a man at all.

In fact he was a boy.

And his name was Puyi.

The diminutive Puyi, just three years old when he inherited the throne, was the great-nephew of the Empress Dowager Cixi (a fact that took me a while to figure out. Imperial Chinese succession can be hideously frustrating, confusing and convoluted). He ‘ruled’ from 1908-1912, although, because he was far too young at the time, his father ruled as his regent.

In 1912, the Republic of China was declared and Puyi abdicated in 1911. He was briefly restored to power for the grand total of eleven days in 1917, but was dethroned on the 12th of July, 1917 and lost power for the second time in less than ten years; this time for good.

Puyi lived in the Forbidden City with his family and his servants and courtiers until 1924. By now, Imperial Chinese Rule had disintergrated to such a level that it was little more than a show of power and a shadow of what it once was. The palace eunuchs had all been fired in 1923 and the enormous imperial complex was virtually empty. In 1924, Puyi was finally kicked out of the palace. To prevent his returning to the Forbidden City and possibly staging a coup to take back the throne, the entire palace complex was declared a museum and the Forbidden City was given its current name: the Palace Museum.

Puyi’s life was one of constant change. Even though he was an emperor of China, he never ever really ruled anything. Not China, not even the puppet-state of Manchukou which the Japanese made him the ruler of in 1932. He finally died on the 17th of October, 1967. He was 61 years old.

Before his death, Puyi was encouraged by the government of the People’s Republic of China to write his autobiography, perhaps recognising his significant and special place in Chinese history. His autobiography (translated from Chinese) is “The First Half of My Life“. When the text was translated into English, it was given the title “From Emperor to Citizen”.

The History of the Forbidden City

The Forbidden City (documentary)

17/11/2011 by Scheong

The Killing Fields – Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge

I’m sure if you asked many people what “The Killing Fields” were, they’d tell you that it was a movie.

And so it was. A movie about a true event. An event that was as horrific as it was true. An event that rocked the world and which changed and destroyed a country forever. An event which saw two million people butchered, tortured, starved, beaten, shot and bludgeoned to death for no other reason than the desire to create a better world. Truly, the story of the Killing Fields, the story of Pol Pot, the story of the Khmer Rouge, the story of the Cambodian Genocide, is “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions” in its absolute essence.

Cambodia in the 1970s

For 90 years, from 1863 to 1953, Cambodia was part of the extensive French colonies around Southeast Asia. Along with the majority of Vietnam and Laos, it made up a collection of colonies then called “French Indochina”.

In the years after the Second World War’s ending in 1945, many colonised countries demanded independence from their European masters. India, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam were chief among these who wanted independence from Britain and France respectively. British transitions of power and decolonisation happened relatively peacefully, with little incident. The French, however, wanted desperately to hold onto their colonies in Indochina. This sparked the fierce French colonial wars of the 1950s. In time, this collection of conflicts would be called the First and Second Indochinese Wars.

Today, they’re just called the Vietnam War.

In 1954, Cambodia successfully won its official independence from France. However, fighting in nearby Vietnam meant that Cambodia was far from being a stable country. With the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Vietnam War came to its eventual end. But in neighbouring Cambodia, things were going from bad to worse.

The Vietnam War had significant effects on Cambodia and there were shortages of food, water and almost everything else required to sustain human life in any comfort. Enter the Khmer Rouge.

In English, ‘Khmer Rouge’ literally means ‘Red Cambodians’, from the Cambodian Khmer word ‘Khmer’, which means ‘Cambodian’, and the French word ‘Rouge’, which means ‘red’. Red being traditionally associated with communism, this was therefore effectively the Communist Party of Cambodia.

Wanting to improve Cambodia and make it self-sufficient, the Khmer Rouge and its leader, Pol Pot, fought a vicious, five-year war (from 1970-1975), against the Khmer Republic, the United States and the Republic of Vietnam (until 1975, also called ‘South Vietnam’).

The Cambodian Civil War, as it was called, ended in 1975 with a Khmer Rouge victory in the capital of Phnom Penh.

Khmer Rouge Reforms

The Khmer Rouge wanted to make Cambodia a new country. It wanted to make it self-sufficient. It wanted to make it powerful. It wanted to start over.

Literally.

The Khmer Rouge started by ordering all Cambodian civilians out of the cities. Phnom Penh to start with, but eventually, other population-centers as well. What would follow would be four years of torture, genocide, mass-murder, execution and starvation.

The Khmer Rouge managed to empty the city of Phnom Penh by spreading a false rumor that there was going to be an American air-raid on the capital. As there were insufficient air-raid shelters in Phnom Penh, the population would be safer if they relocated to specially-constructed ‘camps’ outside in the countryside.

This was false, of course. There was no air-raid. And once the population had been relocated to the countryside, it was easy for Khmer Rouge soldiers to pick and separate people and send them to the camps. From here, the Khmer Rouge would start a new country, called the ‘Democratic Kampuchea’.

Of course, there was absolutely nothing ‘democratic’ about this new country.

Once Cambodians reached the camps, they were separated from each other, because of the desire of the Khmer Rouge to build a new country. An agricultural country where people grew their own food. Where foreign influences did not exist. A country that was Cambodia for the Cambodians. Anyone who had any links to anything that wasn’t Cambodian, or which was capitalist in nature was duly disposed of.

Hundreds of doctors, lawyers, nurses, businessmen, diplomats, teachers, anyone who had anything at all to do with with the former Republic of Cambodia government, anyone who worked for a foreign government and anyone with a university degree was interrogated and then killed in any number of ways. Almost anyone in Cambodia who had any kind of education, from university down to elementary school, was killed. The Khmer Rouge didn’t want all these smart, dangerous people screwing up their wonderful new vision for Cambodia.

Also on the kill-list were ethnic minorities. Monks. Vietnamese. Chinese. Any Western foreigners. Also, anyone wearing glasses. A person wearing eyeglasses was judged to be educated and intelligent (the only reason ANYONE would have eyeglasses is because they need them to READ, right?) And all classes of educated persons were executed, along with those bespectacled Cambodians who probably never read a word in their lives.

Also among the targeted groups were town-dwellers. Urbanites. City-slickers. They were stupid, ignorant, lazy people. The new Cambodia would be have an economy based on farming and agriculture. These city-dwellers had no idea how to farm or grow crops or dig ditches. So they too were executed because they would not be any use in the “New Cambodia”.

“Old” and “New” People

After the Khmer Rouge came to power, Cambodian people were split into two broad groups. ‘Old people’ and ‘new people’.

‘Old People’ referred to the old classes of people who had lived in Cambodia for centuries. Generally, this meant the Cambodian peasantry. The country folk who lived in small villages, who provided their own food, their own traditional folk-medicines, the people who worked the land and farmed and bred animals and who lived the perfect, peaceful, relaxing peasant existence. They had no need for an education. No need for wordly goods. No need to read or write, because everything they had was already provided for them by nature. There was total equality and nobody had more or less than anyone else.

This was the Cambodia that the Khmer Rouge dreamed of. A peasant agricultural society of peace, tranquility and equality for everyone.

But to get there, they had to first get rid of, or change, the ‘New People’.

The Cambodian ‘New People’ were all those who were city-dwellers. Who were professionals. Who were educated. Who were learned. Who earned money, who owned material goods, who challenged each other and strived to be the best. This was the complete opposite to what the Khmer Rouge wanted or liked. New People had to be destroyed. And they were, in their hundreds of thousands.

After being transplanted from the cities to the countryside, the ‘New People’ were immediately put to work. They had to farm. Grow crops. Harvest rice and grain. They had to dig-ditches, plough fields, they had to chop wood, tend to farm-animals and do all other kinds of things which these people had never before had to do, and which they had no idea how to do! And that was THEIR fault which THEY would be punished for, because the Khmer Rouge wasn’t going to teach them how to be farmers or peasants or labourers. If they weren’t smart enough to be stupid, they would pay the price. And they did.

Anyone who couldn’t work the twelve-hour working days on very little food and almost no sleep were taken away and killed. After digging their own graves, they were beaten and then buried. Whether or not they were actually dead was unimportant, and people could be (and were) buried alive, dying of suffocation. The Khmer Rouge cadres were under strict rules not to waste ammunition on anybody who was not considered important. To conserve what little ammunition they had (which they used to fight the Vietnamese), Khmer Rouge cadres killed their enemies using plastic bags, drowning, burying alive, beating and bludgeoning with clubs, axes, shovels, rifle-butts…anything at all. So long as it wasn’t a bullet.

The Killing Fields

So. What exactly were the infamous ‘Killing Fields’?

The term ‘Killing Fields’ was coined by Cambodian journalist and genocide survivor, Dith Pran, who moved to the United States in the 1980s. It referred to the various sites around rural Cambodia where a total of two million Cambodians were either killed, or to which they were taken to be buried after being killed elsewhere. Estimates of exactly how many people are buried in these vast, unmarked mass-graves varies from about 1,300,000, up to three million. The general consensus is that the actual number is about two million people.

Toul Sleng Prison

We’ve all heard of Alcatraz. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobbibor, Sing-Sing and other famous prisons or prison-camps around the world that have existed at various times in history.

But how many of us have heard of a place called…Toul Sleng?

Toul Sleng is Khmer for ‘Strychnine Hill’.

Strychnine is an extremely poisonous substance, used as often for saving people as well as killing them.

This ‘Strychnine Hill Prison’ was known by another name.

S-21. Security Prison #21.

And it was feared by all Cambodians.

S-21 was not actually a prison. In an earlier life, it was actually a highschool. The Chao Ponhea Yat Highschool. But when the Khmer Rouge came to power, the school-buildings were transformed into a prison-complex. Classrooms that once taught children and teenagers their languages, their histories, their sciences and mathematics, their geography and music, were turned into torture-chambers and cramped, tiny prison-cells or holding-cells. The entire school-campus was surrounded by barbed wire and electric-fences. The windows were all barred to prevent escapes and probably most interestingly, the prison’s commandant was Kang Kek Lew…a former maths-teacher. Who better to keep a track of the records of the estimated 17-20,000+ people that the prison ‘processed’ through the years?

Nobody was safe from Toul Sleng. Everyone from doctors, lawyers, teachers, professors, students, ethnic minorities, Western foreigners, monks and almost anyone else with an education. In later years, the Toul Sleng Prison, perhaps ironically, was also used to house members of the Khmer Rouge party itself! Intense paranoia had spread in the Party in the later years of its existence as the rulers of Cambodia and hundreds of party-members were sent through Toul Sleng. Here, they were interrogated, photographed, tortured, interrogated, tortured, interrogated, tortured, interrogated and tortured again.

Medical facilities within Toul Sleng were almost non-existent. What medical help there was proved to be woefully undertrained and understaffed. The medics in the prison knew almost no medicine at all – after all, all the doctors and medical professors had been killed – and the ony purpose in having a medical staff in Toul Sleng was to keep people alive for longer so that they could be tortured for longer.

Conditions in the prison were shocking. There was almost no food and no water. Life was so terrible that committing suicide was infinitely better than trying to survive. Of the nearly twenty thousand people who went into Toul Sleng, only seven people (some say up to a dozen) ever came out.

Today, Toul Sleng is a genocide museum.

Pol Pot: Brother Number One

So. Who is this ‘Pol Pot’?

He was born Saloth Sar, on the 30th of November, 1925. He lived his middle-class existence in rural Cambodia. As a child, he was sent to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, to study. After winning a scholarship there, he travelled to Paris, France. In France, he failed miserably at his university studies. How miserably? He flunked his exams three times in a row. It was while he was in France that he got exposed to the local communist parties and so began his interest in communism and what it could do for Cambodia, which in the 1950s and 60s, was struggling under French colonial rule.

Pol Pot returned to Cambodia in 1953 as a young university drop-out fired up with communist beliefs. Over the next twenty-plus years, he would establish the Khmer Rouge, give speeches, rally followers and start a revolution that would end with a communist victory in 1975. With Cambodia firmly under his control, he could start his new, glorious peasant society, starting from “Year Zero”. What Pol Pot wanted to do was nothing less than literally starting civilisation from scratch, all over again.

The End of an Era

So…what happened in Cambodia that caused the eventual end of the Khmer Rouge regime? Did it just self-destruct from poor handling, rampant idealism and internal paranoia? Or was there a people’s revolution? Or was Pol Pot killed by a foreign assassin?

None of those, actually.

The Khmer Rouge regime eventually collapsed because of outside forces. For centuries, there was always an intense animosity between Cambodia and its neighbour, Vietnam. During the early 1970s, South Vietnam fought a war with the United States against Cambodia, in an attempt to keep the Khmer Rouge from gaining power. But in 1975, the Vietnam War ended with the fall of the South and the evacuation of American forces, leaving North Vietnam, in Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, victorious over their respective peoples. But almost at once, another war started.

North Vietnamese communists had an uneasy partnership with the Khmer Rouge and it was never one that was going to last. Pol Pot was paranoid about Vietnam and in the second half of the 1970s, he ordered an invasion by the Khmer Rouge, into border-villages in Vietnam.

Hardened by years of fighting and with buckets of combat experience, in 1978, the Vietnamese Army easily forced back the hodge-podge Khmer Rouge soldiers who were fighting with limited munitions and weaponry. In history, this conflict was called the Cambodian-Vietnamese War.

In truth, the war had started the moment the Vietnam War ended, in 1975, but fullscale military operations didn’t begin until 1978. Angry with the Cambodian presence on their native soil, the Vietnamese Army fought back and went on the offensive, charging full tilt into Cambodia. The severely underpowered Cambodian Army was easily overwhelmed by the vastly superior and much more experienced Vietnamese forces. The People’s Republic of China attempted to mediate between the two countries, but Vietnam grew more and more uneasy and in late 1978, a fullscale Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was underway.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was not supported by the international community. Of course, this was before news about the Cambodian genocide started making it onto the international airwaves. As Vietnamese forces surged into Cambodia and uncovered evidence of horrendous crimes, opinions about the Vietnamese invasion began to change…although that didn’t stop China from invading Vietnam in 1979 to teach it a lesson about invading Cambodia.

What followed was a ten-year occupation of Cambodia by the Vietnamese, between 1979-1989. The Khmer Rouge were forced out of power and what members who weren’t captured or killed, fled into the countryside, and a new “People’s Republic of Cambodia” was established. The communist republic lasted from 1979 until 1993. In 1993, Cambodia became a democracy and is unique among all nations as being the only communist (or former communist) country to have re-established its monarchy. The Cambodian monarchy was restored in 1993 as part of the government reforms. The current ruler of Cambodia is Norodom Sihamoni.

The End of the Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge did not end when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. Some were killed or arrested, but others merely fled into the jungles. It wasn’t until 1998, with Pol Pot’s death under house-arrest, that the Khmer Rouge was finally put out of action. Trials for war-crimes committed by members of the Khmer Rouge are still being held today. With a total population of about 8 million people, Pol Pot and his regime successfully killed roughly one quarter (that’s one person in every four), of his country’s entire population.

If you’re looking for more information about the Khmer Rouge and what happened during those years, look for the documentaries “Return to the Killing Fields“, “Pol Pot: Inside Evil”, and “Pol Pot: Secret Killer“, three films which were my main sources for this grisly article. At the time of this posting, all three documentries (along with several others concentrating on the Khmer Rouge), may be found on YouTube.

28/10/2011 by Scheong

Men’s Hats: A Brief History & A Look at the Hat in the 21st Century

This posting marks the second anniversary of the starting of my blog, back on the 29th of October, 2009. To date, I have received over 253,500 hits. Thanks to everyone who has peeked in here and learned something. Thanks to everyone who has commented on, asked questions about, or clarified and improved on the postings that I’ve made over the last twenty-four months. And thanks to all my regular readers for checking back every now and then to see what’s new and leaving your marks in my comments boxes (yes, there are people who will subject themselves to the masochism of reading this blog on a regular basis). Yadda, yadda, yadda. I digress.

On this date last year, I wrote about how to effectively use a traditional straight-razor to get a superior (and cost-effective) shave. In the 21st century, straight-razor shaving is coming back into fashion as men become attracted to the nostalgia, the masculinity, the effectiveness, the ‘greenness’ and the thriftiness of straight-razor shaving.

This posting will concentrate another historical titbit that has recently started coming back into fashion:

Hats.

Hats are forever linked to history. We identify various periods in history by a lot of things: The technology, the science, the architecture, but probably most of all, we identify them by the fashions of the times. The hats and clothes that people wore. Or in more recent times, didn’t wear. For a period between the 1970s-1990s, mens’ hats went out of fashion. Nobody was wearing them. Hats were old-fashioned, dated, boring. They didn’t fit the clothes that people were wearing. But then, in the early 21st century, hat-wearing for men (and women) is coming back into fashion. This article will look at the history of men’s hats and the hat’s place in modern society. Here we go…

The Hat: Yesterday and Today

Ever since ancient times, men have worn hats. To keep the sun off, to keep warm, to look fashionable or to add a few inches of height to their stumpy frames. In the early 21st century, hats for men are making a significant return to mainstream fashion, nudged along by recent movies and TV shows such as “Boardwalk Empire”, “Public Enemies”, “Upstairs, Downstairs”, “Downton Abbey” and “Underbelly: Razor”. But what are the histories of all these popular hats that we see in movies, TV shows and photographs? In period dramas? That we read about in books? Where did they come from? How long have they been around? Where do they get their names from? Let’s find out…

The Tricorne Hat

When? 1700s
Who? Patriots, sea-captains, any male cast-member of a colonial-era costume-drama.

Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) wearing a tricorne hat

The tricorne is the famous, triangle-shaped hat with a round crown at the top. It’s the hat that Mel Gibson wears in “The Patriot”. It’s the hat worn by almost every male actor who’s ever participated in a 1700s historical reenactment of the American Revolution, or the French Revolutionary Wars. Where did it come from?

The tricorne is a stiff hat made of felt (usually beaver or rabbit felt). It evolved from the round, wide-brimmed hats of the late 1600s, similar to the ones shown below:

In the early 1700s, it became fashionable to fold up the circular brims of these hats and attach them to the crown with needle and thread. This stopped the wide, floppy brims from blocking the wearer’s line of sight, but the folded brims also became rain-gutters that stopped rainwater from simply sloshing off the old wide brims and down the back of your neck. The rain instead ran out the corners of the hat and down the back of your shoulders, away from your body.

The tricorne was invented by the Spanish in the late 1600s/early 1700s. It quickly became popular in France and other parts of Europe, as well as in England and in the American colonies. The hat remained popular right up to the end of the 1790s. It was then replaced by the bicorne hat, popularly associated with Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Top Hat

When? Early 1800s
Who? Abraham Lincoln, Uncle Moneybags (the ‘Monopoly’ man), the Fat Controller in Thomas the Tank Engine, anyone from Dickensian England.

A typical top hat

The top hat is very rarely worn today, except on the most formal of formal occasions, but there was a time not too long ago, when it was worn by everybody on every day of the week.

The top hat was born in the 1790s and became the replacement headwear for men after the tricorne hat of the 18th century started going out of fashion. The top hat is a stiff hat made of felt (usually beaver felt, but rabbit felt is also used). The top hat was worn by everyone during the Victorian era, from the poorest of paupers all the way up to the richest of royals. Abraham Lincoln is famous for wearing a top hat style popularly called the ‘stovepipe’, because of its excessively high crown. Considering that Lincoln towered over the average mid-century American at an impressive six foot, four inches, he probably didn’t need anything else to make him stick out in the crowd.

The top hat was worn for all kinds of occasions, from going to the theatre and to the opera, to weddings, important public events, formal social events or just for daily wear. Top hats worn for weddings are usually light grey in colour, while top hats worn for evening events are jet black. In the 1840s and 50s, the top hat started being made out of the more familiar silk that it’s known for today, and manufacture of beaver-felt top hats started to decline. Because of the top hat’s height and size, the collapsable top hat was invented in 1812 by Antoine Gibus. Its collapsable quality made it popular because such hats were easier to store in cloakrooms of hotels, theatres and restaurants.

Up until the early 1860s, officers of the London Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard’s famous ‘bobbies’) used to wear strengthened top hats for head-protection as part of their uniform. In 1863, the present ‘custodion helmet’ replaced them.

The Bowler Hat

When? Mid-1800s
Who? Accountants, bankers, Charlie Chaplin, Oddjob, the Plug Uglies.

A classic black bowler hat

The Bowler hat, characterised by it’s dome-like crown, was invented in 1849 by a pair of hatmakers: brothers Thomas and William…Bowler. They were commissioned by the famous London hat retailer “Lock & Co” to invent a close-fitting, low-crowned hat that would be sturdy and which couldn’t be easily knocked or blown off the wearer’s head. The Bowler brothers later found out that their customer was Edward Coke, brother to the Second Earl of Leicester.

When the prototype ‘Bowler’ hat was invented, Mr. Coke came to check it out. He showed up in London on the 17th of December, 1849 and headed to Lock & Co’s shop to examine his new hat. Remembering that he had asked for a particularly durable creation, Mr. Coke threw the hat on the ground and jumped on it twice to check its strength. When the hat remained in shape, Coke proclaimed his satisfaction at this new invention and paid twelve shillings for the hat.

The Bowler hat remained popular throughout the 1800s and through the first half of the 1900s, being worn by everyone from politicians, actors and the everyman on the street.

But who, you might ask, are the ‘Plug Uglies’?

The Plug Uglies were an American street-gang of the mid-1800s. They were famous for almost all of them wearing their distinctive bowler hats. Because of the bowler’s strength, the hats were worn by the Uglies as helmets to prevent head-injuries in the middle of gang-fights.

The Fedora & Trilby Hats

When? Late 1800s
Who? Humphrey Bogart, Adam Savage, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Prohibition-era gangsters, Indiana Jones, almost every man in the 20s and 30s.

Humphrey Bogart sporting a classic, wide-brimmed Fedora

Frank Sinatra wearing the Fedora’s little brother, a Trilby. You can immediately tell the difference between them: The trilby has a much shorter brim (and although you can’t see it in that photo, it would have a tight, upwards curl at the back)

The Fedora, and its little brother, the Trilby, are two of the most famous and timeless of all men’s hats. Both invented in the early 1890s, the Fedora and the Trilby remained largely popular into the 1960s. Since then, their popularity dropped significantly, but in the 2000s, they have returned to style thanks to recent 1930s-era gangster-films and TV shows that have been flashing across the television-screens of the world.

The Fedora was invented in 1891, and the Trilby in 1894. The Fedora features a wide brim, a hat-band or ribbon and a pinched and indented crown. The Trilby is similarly shaped, but typically has a shorter brim (and a tighter upturning at the back). Both hats are traditionally made of rabbit or beaver felt and come in both firm and soft varieties.

The Fedora and Trilby hats became popular because of their relatively compact size (compared with something like a top hat) and their lower profiles. They could be worn comfortably in cars and on public transport without the hat’s brim obscuring the driver’s line of sight. Hollywood movies of the 20s, 30s and 40s made the Fedora incredibly popular and it used to be that almost every man owned at least one.

Here’s an interesting fact you might not know: The fedora, when it started out in the 1890s, was actually a women’s hat! This trend lasted through the 1900s up to the late 1910s; all the males in the world sticking to bowlers, flat caps and top hats instead. However, fashion changed in the 20s (as did many other things) and today, the fedora, and its little brother, the Trilby, have become more than ever, associated with male wearers.

The Boater Hat

When? Late 1800s
Who? Punters, oarsmen, sailors, barbershop quartets, vaudeville entertainers, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers…

The Dapper Dans, Disneyland’s resident 1900s-style barbershop quartet, with their matching waistcoats, trousers, sleeve-garters and of course…their boater hats

The Boater hat, characterised by its flat crown, straight sides, flat brim and circular or oval profile, is the classic summertime hat. It gets the name ‘Boater’ (also called a ‘Skimmer’ hat) because it was traditionally worn by Venetian gondoliers. It was from Italy that the hat spread rapidly around the world. It remained popular from the 1880s all the way through to the 1930s and 40s, slowly dying off after the Second World War.

Before becoming the piece of classic summertime headgear which we know today,
the boater was the traditional hat of Venetian gondoliers, designed to protect them from the strong Italian sun

The classic boater hat is made of straw. This makes it lightweight, comfortable and breathable in hot summer weather, when thicker felt hats, more suitable for winter, would make the wearer sweat and perspire very freely. The boater remains popular today in countries with strong summers where other styles of hats would be uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time. Why is this hat also called a ‘skimmer’? Well, traditionally, the ‘boater’ had a more generous brim-width. The ‘Skimmer’ is a variant of the Boater with a narrower brim.

Panama Hat

When? Early 1800s
Who? Harry Truman, Edward VII, Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, Theodore Roosevelt

A traditional Panama hat, complete with its wide brim, perfect for protection from the tropic sun

Along with the Boater, the Panama hat is another classic mens’ summer hat. The Panama hat comes in a variety of crown-shapes, but it is distinguished by the material used to make it: The leaves of the Toquilla Palm. The fronds of this particular type of tree (although it is not scientifically considered a proper palmtree) are soft, strong and flexible, ideal for making light, durable, breathable summer hats.

The Panama was invented in the early 1800s, probably in the 1830s. Despite what the name suggests, the hats were not invented (or even made) in Panama. They were actually invented in Ecquador. They get the name ‘Panama’ because that was the country to which most of these new hats were exported. The tropical climate of Panama made just such a hat ideal to cope with the soggy, humid conditions in just such a country. As the hat’s fame spread around the world, it became a popular summertime hat and general travel-hat. It’s light construction and breathable material made it ideal for summer use and its soft, crushable material (which would retain its shape with some gentle prodding after being unrolled) made it perfect for travelling, when a man could just roll up the hat, tie a ribbon around it and put it in his suitcase.

The Panama remains popular today (along with the Fedora and the Trilby) as a summer hat.

The Homburg Hat

When? Late 1800s
Who? Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Edward VII, Hercule Poirot

Winston Churchill wearing his signature Homburg hat

Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot (portrayed by David Suchet) with his three-piece suit, pocketwatch, swan-headed cane and of course…his Homburg

The Homburg is a very distinct hat. It has a tightly curled brim on both sides and a dent or crease in the top of the crown, running lengthwise from front to back. The Homburg is named after Bad Homburg (‘Homburg Baths’), a town in the state of Hesse in Germany, where it was created. It was introduced to the world at large by the youthfully fashionable but increasingly overweight Prince Albert Edward, later Edward VII of the United Kingdom, son of Queen Victoria. The Homburg was a popular hat in the late Victorian period and remained popular through the first half of the 20th century. It was commonly associated with politicians; Winston Churchill was a notable wearer of this style of hat. Homburgs are typically made of rabbit felt.

The Flat Cap

When? 1500s
Who? Working-class men, newsboys, golfers, Dr. Harry Cooper.

Brad Pitt wearing a flat cap

The classic flat cap (also called a newsboy cap, eight-panel cap, driving-cap…the list goes on) is a light, floppy cap or hat, traditionally made of lightly spun wool. Variations of the flat-cap date back centuries, when wool was the backbone of the English economy. It arrived in its present form (and variations thereof) in the early 1800s. Because flat-caps were cheap, comfortable and long-lasting, they were frequently worn by poorer, working-class people looking for an affordable and effective head-covering to keep their heads warm during outdoor work in cold weather.

The flat cap comes in two varieties: The traditional flat-topped cap and a variation called the Eight-Panel Cap (alternatively, also the six-panel cap). The eight-panel or six-panel cap is characterised by six (or eight, hence the name) triangular panels sewn together to make a rough circle on the top of the hat, held together in the center by a cloth knob or button. This variety of cap is sometimes called the ‘newsboy’ cap, because it was commonly worn by newsboys (children hired by newspaper companies) who sold newspapers on street-corners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As the 20th century progressed, the flat cap became popular with a wealthier set. Because other hat-styles of the day were too bulky and cumbersome to wear with a pair of goggles, early motorists would wear a flat cap with their driving outfits when they went out for a spin. The flat cap’s low profile meant that it wouldn’t fly off in the slipstream generated by early, open-top cars, and it would keep dust and grit from getting into the driver’s hair. In Australia, the flat cap is commonly associated with noted veterinary surgeon, Dr. Harry Cooper.

The Pith Helmet

When? 1870s
Who? Big game hunters, soldiers, prospectors, Van Pelt from ‘Jumanji’.

A classic pith-helmet

The Pith Helmet is the classic hunter’s headgear. Together with a khaki outfit, boots, socks, a belt, a cylindrical canteen of water and a fully-loaded shotgun, it conjures up images of tracking and hunting big game in the wilds of Africa or the jungles of subtropic America. Or possibly, it makes you think of the British soldiers in the film “Zulu“.

The pith helmet was invented in the mid-1800s, but it gained its current, iconic shape in the 1870s. It’s made, not out of straw or felt, but rather out of a material called ‘pith’.

Pith is the soft, spongy tissue found inside the branches and trunks of trees. It’s typically white (or light brown) in colour. The pith used to make the classic pith-helmet comes from the Sola Pith, a flowering plant native to tropical countries such as India and Malaysia.

The Slouch Hat

When? 1600s
Who? Military personnel, the ANZACs

A vintage slouch hat from the Australian Army, ca. 1955. Note the upcurved brim, pinned in place with a ‘Rising Sun’ Australian military badge

The slouch hat, instantly recognisable from its pinched crown and wide, floppy brim, is a holdover from the years of Stuart England. The slouch hat was invented in England in the 1600s and it rose and fell in popularity for the next 200-odd years. It came back to fashion in the 1800s when it was adopted for use by the British Army and starting in the 1880s, the military forces of what would eventually become the Commonwealth of Australia. The slouch hat is a soft felt hat and its wide brim made it especially handy in hot weather when it kept the sun off the wearer’s face and body.

However, because of the hat’s wide brim, it soon became apparent that this hat was perhaps not the best choice for soldiers. The floppy, soft felt of the hat’s brim would get in the way of a soldier’s rifle when he raised it against his shoulder in presentation, or when he raised his arm and braced the rifle against his shoulder, ready to fire. To fix this problem, it became the fashion to pin up one side of the hat’s brim to make way for the rifle and to stop it from getting in the way. The hat remains closely associated with the Australian Army to this day, along with the pinned-up brim.

Hats in the 21st Century

Since the mid-2000s, mens’ hats have been returning to fashion with increasing speed, spurred on by popular new movies and TV shows that have their settings in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. The Trilby and its big brother, the Fedora, have become extremely popular and they’re now available in a wide range of colours, sizes and materials, ranging from the cheapest, mass-produced cheap straw and paper-woven $20 flea-market variety, to the heirloom-quality, felt hats of the early 20th century. Today, hats are being worn to keep the head warm and the face cool, hats are being worn to complete a vintage-inspired ‘look’, or to accessorise a more modern, casual kit. Is the hat here to stay? Maybe. Will its use continue to rise or remain steady? Or is it just a fad? Who knows? Everything old is new again. Fashion comes in waves, but style stays forever. As people become more health-conscious about the dangers of overexposure to the sun, and the comforts that a good hat can give them either in summer or winter, hats will continue to rise in popularity due to their sheer practicality, if for nothing else.

Buying a Hat Today

Okay. You’ve read all that stuff and now you’re bored. Or maybe you’re interested. Interested enough, perhaps, to buy your very first hat. You’re tired of those baseball caps that you collected when you were a kid and you want to get a proper guy’s hat. Maybe you’ve always wanted one. Maybe you think they’re stylish. Maybe you bought a new suit and you want a hat to go with it. Perhaps you just finished a “Boardwalk Empire” marathon? What do you look for in a nice hat?

Material

Hats can be made of anything. Plastic, wool, straw, sedge, paper…But a proper hat, a hat that you can wear out to dinner, or out on a cold wintery day to keep your head warm, is traditionally made of felt. Two different kinds of felt, to be precise.

Depending on where you live and which animal is more readily available, hats can be made of either rabbit or beaver-fur felt. In Europe, the tradition leans towards beaver felt first and rabbit felt second. In Australia, by comparison, hats are made of rabbit-felt (the rabbit being a plentiful and pestilential creature that roams the Australian outback in frustrating abundance). Rabbit felt is generally smoother and a bit firmer, while beaver felt tends to be a little ‘fluffier’ and softer. Benefits of animal felt in hatmaking include water-resistence (hats made of beaver and/or rabbit felt will not shrink if they get wet, as opposed to cheaper hats made of wool-felt), strength (they won’t rip or tear easily) and shape (they won’t deform as easily as other materials).

The majority of classic mens’ hats are made of felt. The Homburg, Trilby, Fedora, Top Hat and Bowler are all felt hats. Felt hats are usually winter hats. They’ll keep your head warm if it’s windy, rainy or snowy outside, and they’re nice and fuzzy and soft. However, felt hats are not very good for summertime use. There’s very little ventilation in such hats, so any heat trapped inside (which would be beneficial in winter) would become extremely uncomfortable in summer.

Summer hats are traditionally made of straw in a variety of weaves, that will make them either firm or loose and floppy. The Boater hat traditionally has a tight weave and is very firm and hard. The Panama Hat, by comparison (also made of a variety of straw), is lighter and floppier and a bit more breathable. Panamas are so cloth-like in their construction, that some varieties of this hat can even be rolled up for storage; something that would destroy a boater.

Lining

Not all hats come with linings. Some top-quality hats are deliberately sold without linings because the hat material would make linings unnecessary or ineffective (such as soft, floppy felt hats, where the lining would get crushed and crinkled anyway). Linings on hats are typically made of silk. On some hats (generally the newer hats), the silk lining is further protected by an additional plastic lining, which would prevent sweat-stains from damaging the silk. Plastic interior liners also have the advantage of being easier to wipe clean.

Sweatband

Eeeww yuck!

Oh come on. Everyone sweats. And those who wear hats are no exception. One way to tell a good-quality hat from a cheaper one is to check the sweatband. Cheaper hats may just have cotton sweatbands or no sweatbands at all. Hats of good quality (whether they be felt or straw) traditionally have sweatbands made of high-quality leather. Leather is soft, comfortable, strong and long-lasting. Leather sweatbands are traditionally machine-sewn into the linings of their hats, but in more modern times, sewing might be reinforced (or completely replaced) by super-strength industrial glue.

Ribbons/Bands

Awww. Ribbons…Cute!

Hat-bands or hat-ribbons have adorned hats for centuries. No, they’re not an indicator of quality, but they can be an indicator of style. Hats that are traditionally sold with ribbons will typically have them stitched loosely around the crown of the hat. If you feel daring enough, it is possible to remove the ribbon that came with your hat and tie and sew on a new ribbon that’s more to your taste. Hat ribbons are useful features apart from just being aesthetic. Hat-ribbons can be useful places to stick things such as cards (put on a nice suit, grab an old-fashioned magnesium flashbulb camera and stick a ‘PRESS’ card into your hat and you could look like a journalist interviewing one of the survivors of the Hindenburg Crash), matchsticks, feathers or, as was the style from time to time, decorative hat-pins.

How Does It Fit?

A good-fitting hat should sit firmly (but not temple-crushing tightly) around your head, with the brim resting on your ears. It shouldn’t fall off easily when you bend over and it should stay on in a fresh gust of wind.If you’re fighting to put your hat on every morning and it’s giving you migraines once you’ve won the battle…the hat’s too tight. Similarly, if your hat feels loose and shifty on your head and won’t stay in place: Then it’s too big.

Hats are sold in a variety of sizes and sizing-styles, from the standard “S/M/L/XL/XS” to fractioned and whole sizes (7 1/2, 9, 6 1/2 etc) and in centimeter measurements (my hat size, for example, is Size 7, or roughly 57cm, which is about a Medium).

Where to Buy a Hat?

You’re really asking two questions here in my opinion.

1. What hats are there out in the market today?
2. Where can I buy this specific hat that I want?

In the 21st century, with the steady resurgence of classic mens’ headgear, it’s becoming increasingly easy to purchase cheap cotton, wool-felt or even paper-weave hats online ranging in sizes from XS to XL. Or you can go to one of those ‘trendy’ ‘fashion’ clothing stores for the younger set, where hats like those are selling like hotcakes (I know, I used to work in just such a place), and if you’re looking to buy a cheap Trilby or Fedora just to try it on as an experiment and see whether or not you like the whole idea of wearing a hat and if you’re comfortable doing this, I’d recommend one of those shops and one of those more flashy, flowery, ‘out-there’ hats as a way to dip your toes in the water and see whether you like what’s further down in this pool of headwear.

For those of you looking to purchase a proper hat (I apologise if this term seems somewhat derogatory, but it’s true), by which I mean, a hat which looks good, which is made the traditional way, which will last for decades and which you can wear with a variety of outfits, then you can go to the websites of a number of prominent hatmakers and browse their catalogs, select the hat (and most importantly, the SIZE) that fits you, and then make the purchase.

Of course, buying online has one inherent flaw: You can’t try on the hat before you buy it. And unless you’re absolutely damn sure that you know what your hat-size is, I strongly advise caution and research before buying a hat this way.

Okay, great. Now I’ve scared you off of buying a hat online. Where can you buy them ‘in-the-flesh’, so to speak?

If you’re looking for a cheap and/or secondhand hat, trawl places like flea-markets, antiques shops, thrift-shops and those fashiony clothing & accessory shops that I mentioned earlier. There, any hats that you find that you like enough to buy, you can try on before you fork out the cash.

“Yeah but those hats are ugly, old, manky, ripped, loose, tight, stained, frayed, girly…” yadda, yadda, yadda. Yes I know. You want to buy a brand-new hat, but you want to do it properly. You don’t want to risk $100+ on a top-quality hat online which you can’t try on and which might not fit you when you finally get it in your hands, thereby wasting all your money. Now what?

Okay, a simple solution presents itself:

Find a hat-shop. Duh!

Now I realise that the recent history of the hat means that hat-shops are not as plentiful as once they were, which is a great pity, but sometimes, you strike it lucky.

Myself, I live in Melbourne, Australia (if there’s any other Melbournians reading this; take note…) and here in Melbourne, there really is only one place for the discerning hat-wearer to go to. If you want a nice, quality, long-lasting, oldschool felt, straw, Panama, Fedora, Trilby, topper, flat cap, boater etc etc etc etc ad nauseum, there’s really only one shop worth visiting…and I mean that quite literally because it’s the only shop in town. It’s “City Hatters” (for the Melbournians reading this, it’s on the corner of Flinders & Swanston, underneath the Station). I’m fortunate to have this city institution on my doorstep. It’s been operating out of the same shopfront for the past (as of the date of this posting), 101 years.

City Hatters in Melbourne is a traditional mens’ hat-shop and has operated continuously out of the same corner shopfront under Flinders St. Station in Melbourne since it opened in 1910

Now I realise that not every major city (and much less, smaller cities or country towns) have such well-established traditional hat-shops with ribbon-steaming services, brim-repairs and so-forth, but if you are so lucky, drop in at your local hatter’s, ask questions and start trying on lids. These guys will be thankful and appreciative of your patronage and, if they’re anything like the guys at my local hat-shop, will be happy to give you advice about how a hat should fit, feel and look on your head.

25/10/2011 by scheong

Victoria and the Kensington System

Alexandrina Victoria. Queen Victoria. She was the monarch of the United Kingdom for nearly a century, from 1837 until 1901. All around the world there are hundreds, probably thousands of statutes, memorials, buildings, cities, states and people named after her. In her lifetime, the world went from candles and letters to electrical lighting, telegraphs, telephones and radio. From the horse and cart to the world’s first automobiles. From muskets and blackpowder to revolvers and repeating rifles. She lived in an era that saw wars, invasions, new inventions, changes in communications, transport, manufacturing, food-preservation and hundreds of other aspects of daily life far too numerous to list.

And yet, despite being famous the world-over, despite being rich and coming from one of the most powerful families in the world, despite having the chane to have whatever she wanted and do whatever she liked, the then Princess Victoria had what is probably the worst childhood any girl her age could possibly have under the circumstances. Victoria’s childhood was not balls and dinners, parties, dances, meeting the hot young eligible princes of Europe and travelling abroad. It was not travelling around London viewing the sights or going on leisurely picnics with her parents and grandparents. It was the most boring, controlled, restricted childhood you could imagine. And it came about purely out of another person’s greed.

We all have our thoughts of what royal kids are like. Spoilt, arrogant brats with lots of money and plenty of time, status and authority in which to burn it. It wasn’t too long ago that Prince Harry was in the newspapers every other month. Drinking, doing drugs, getting chucked out of nightclubs, dressing up as a Nazi. You’d imagine that a lot of royal children probably grew up like this. And maybe they did. But surprisingly, one of the most famous monarchs ever to wear the English crown had probably the most boring, rigid and agonising childhood you could possibly imagine.

Think your parents are strict? After you read about Victoria’s childhood, you’ll never complain about a 10 o’clock curfew or household chores or doing the laundry ever again.

Who was Victoria?

The future queen was born Alexandrina Victoria on the 24th of May, 1819. She was a long way from the top of the tree and her chances of becoming Queen of England were as unlikely as man walking on the moon. Well, we already know where this is going.

Victoria’s parents were the Duke and Duchess of Kent. The title of Duke of Kent is a royal title, given to the son of a king. Which king? In this case, His Royal Insanity, King George III. Victoria’s father, Prince Edward, was George’s fourth son. Ahead of him were his brothers William, Frederick and George; in that order. If Victoria was ever to become queen, then she would have to wait for her father, her three uncles and her grandfather to die first. And that was never going to happen in just a few short years, was it? So with the long waiting-list, you can see why nobody expected Victoria to become queen.

But then in the 1780s, George III famously went mad and his son, the soon-to-be George IV, replaced him on the throne in 1811, formally becoming king in 1820. George IV was about as popular as another George…named Bush. He was overweight, grouchy, he spent massive amounts of money on food and parties, and he ate like a pig. Not surprisingly when he died in 1830…not many people took notice. After him came his brother William. William had waited so long for the chance to become king that he almost didn’t make it. When his no-good older brother died and left him England, William was already at the seasoned age of 64. However, William was a considerably more popular monarch than his brother. He was more thrifty with money and proved a likeable and pleasant person. But what does all this have to do with Victoria?

Well…

Once William died, the throne would go to his brother, Edward, Victoria’s father. Only there was a problem here because…Edward was already dead. Which meant that the throne would then go, not to his wife, Victoria’s mother, but rather to Victoria herself. And as is so often in royal circles, there are people who want the throne who can’t have it. In this case…Victoria’s mother.

Enter the Kensington System.

Victoria and the Kensington System

The Kensington System is named after the palace in which Victoria was raised…Kensington Palace.

…And it’s soooo purdy…

In essence, the Kensington System was a set of rules and regulations under which the young Princess Victoria was forced, by her mother and her mother’s lover, the unscrupulous Sir John Conroy, to live her life…if you could in all honesty have called it a ‘life’. More like an existence. Alright. Fine. She’s a royal child. She has to be a good girl and set an example for the unwashed peasanty. She must have decorum and tact and be ladylike and like Mary Poppins, must be practically perfect in every way. Right?

Perhaps. We’ll never know.

The Kensington System was designed to keep Victoria in line. It was designed to make her dependent and babyish and weak. It was designed to keep her tied to her mother’s apron-strings with a deadknot. This wasn’t an accident…this was what the Duchess of Kent and her loverboy Conroy actually intended to do. It was part of their plan to wear Victoria down and when her uncle, King William IV died, to force her to sign a paper that would declare a regency, meaning that (for a while at least), Victoria’s mother would become de-facto Queen of England. And not surprisingly, like any teenage girl, Victoria hated all this, and she despised her mother.

So, what did the Kensington System involve?

Well let’s have a look.

1. Princess Victoria is not allowed any privacy at all except when washing, changing or attending the call of nature. She must be accompanied EVERYWHERE (and I mean literally everywhere) by either her mother, her governess or her tutor.

2. She was NOT allowed to walk up or downstairs without holding her mother’s arm. EVER.

3. She was NOT allowed to sleep in her own room under any circumstances. She HAD to share a room with her mother.

4. She would ONLY meet the boys that her darling mother thought were suitable for a royal princess to meet. And absolutely no others.

5. All her activities and daily doings would be recorded in pen and ink.

6. Victoria would be a good girl and give the throne to her mama and her lover.

Wait what?

Yes you read that last one right. Victoria would give the throne to her mother and her lover Sir John Conroy. But more about that in a moment.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, Victoria’s childhood absolutely sucked. From the age when she could walk and talk and after her father died, to the age of 18, she was a virtual prisoner in Kensington Palace. She was badgered day and night by her relentless mother and her life was a living hell. She had no privacy at all. She was followed everywhere at all times. She had almost no friends (apart from servants), she spent countless days being taught by her tutor and her entire day was rigidly structured and timetabled. She had almost no free time and absolutely no time to herself. To top it all off, she was also under constant pressure to wave aside the throne and give it to her mother, the Duchess of Kent. Surely this couldn’t be legal. Right? Well, it was and it wasn’t. Let’s have a look below:

The Problems of Succession

The British Royal Family was not the healthiest of families. George III died blind and insane. George IV died as a fat, ugly, unloved slob and William IV, who inherited his brother’s throne at the ripe old age of 64, wasn’t expected to live very long. William was a popular king, and he must’ve been a prize catch back in the day because his wife adored him. He’d joined the Royal Navy in his youth, and was affectionately called the Sailor King. Despite his best efforts however, the Sailor King couldn’t get his mast up. Yep, you guessed it. He wasn’t able to have a kid with his princess. And not from lack of trying, either. His junk worked fine. It just didn’t work when it was actually imperative that it did. He had TEN children born out of wedlock (and four born within) so obviously something was going right. Just not at the right time. All his legitimate children were either stillborn, miscarried or died soon after birth. Eventually, Prince William and his bride, Princess Adelaide came to accept that they weren’t going to have any children together.

So when the king died, his throne would go to his brother…who was already dead…which meant it would go to Victoria. And this terrified Victoria’s mother.

The Duchess of Kent was a conniving woman, to say the least. Together with Conroy, she forced Victoria over and over and over again, to sign a document that would declare a regency. But Victoria, stubborn and determined, repeatedly refused to do it.

Giving consent to a regency meant that if Victoria’s Uncle William died before Victoria reached legal adulthood (the age of 18), then until she reached that age, her mother (and by extension, her lover, Sir John Conroy) would be the regent (de-facto ruler) of the United Kingdom. The Duchess of Kent was so determined for this to happen that she wanted to turn her daughter into a weak and dependent baby, unfit to be queen and who would willingly give over power to her mother…to which end, the Kensington System had been created.

Victoria’s Reaction

Unsurprisingly, Victoria hated the Kensington System with a vengeance. She loathed it. And as you might expect, the Kensington system completely destroyed any positive relationship that Victoria had with her mother. Victoria was incredibly moody and emotional…and not just because she was getting her period. She wanted out of the Kensington System, and she wanted out NOW.

But the Duchess and Conroy were determined to have their way. But then, something happened that probably none of them ever expected.

William IV lived.

Although he had been in failing health for some time, William was no fool. He was well aware of his sister-in-law’s intentions regarding his beloved niece, Victoria, and the throne. And he was extremely upset by it. However, he got his own back at the Duchess of Kent by purely existing. In August, 1836, William IV celebrated his 71st birthday, no mean feat for a man back then. Most likely infuriating the Duchess, the king invited his darling niece, Victoria, to his birthday party. Of course, the Duchess and Victoria couldn’t very well refuse a king’s invitation, and so attended the party. The Duchess’s reception at the party was frosty at best. William despised his sister-in-law. But he adored his niece and welcomed Victoria into his court with open arms. However, the king’s biggest gift from his niece wasn’t her presence at his birthday party, it was him living long enough to witness Victoria’s 18th birthday.

For you see, on the 24th of May, 1837, the king was still alive.

And the 24th of May, 1837 was Victoria’s 18th birthday.

If King William IV died on any time after this date, Victoria would legally ascend to the throne as a mature adult. And therefore, a regency couldn’t be declared and the Duchess’s plans would be destroyed.

In 1837, the king’s health was failing rapidly. He suffered from chest-pains, breathing-difficulties, asthma-attacks and shortness of breath. On occasions, his health was so bad that he would even pass out from time to time. On the 20th of June, 1837, the respected, loved and elderly William IV…died.

The End of the Kensington System

William’s death at the ripe old age of seventy-one destroyed the Duchess’s plans to be regent for her daughter, Victoria. By the time of the king’s death, Victoria was 18 for nearly a whole month. She was now Queen of England.

Almost immediately, Victoria started making things happen. To begin with, she ordered her bed to be removed from her mother’s bedroom and placed in a separate chamber. She was queen now and would sleep *gasp* ON HER OWN! She would not allow anyone to accompany her anywhere without her personal say-so, she would walk where-ever she wanted, upstairs or down. She demanded to have an hour a day, every single day of the year, to be on her own. This was a huge liberty to Victoria, who previously had always been accompanied by someone else. Now she could have privacy and could be left alone with her thoughts. She forbade Sir John Conroy from having any contact with her at all and banished him from the royal court and finally, she would see who she liked and married whoever she liked. Like that handsome dude named Albert. Unfortunately, Albert also proved to be Victoria’s cousin, but that didn’t stop her eventually having nine children with him.

After her ascension to the throne, Victoria moved out of Kensington Palace and moved to the recenty-completed Buckingham Palace, the current London residence of the British Royal Family. Victoria was the first monarch to live there, since her uncle, William IV, died before the palace was completed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Duchess of Kent tried to follow her daughter and she moved into the palace too…with disastrous results. Victoria kicked her mother out of the palace and banned her from visiting her or seeing her at all. Relations remained frosty until the early 1840s when Victoria reluctantly allowed her mother to visit her newly born grandchildren. It took a while, but their relationship finally repaired itself.

For all the other things that Queen Victoria was, from a grumpy mother to a passionate wife, a dedicated queen and a cow of a woman, she certainly didn’t have a pleasant childhood. Victoria never knew her father (he died when she was 8 months old) and had spent her entire youth being badgered by her mother. Whoever thinks that rich kids always get it good might want to think again…

If you’re looking for more info on British royalty, you might want to look here. Or if you want more info on Victoria specifically, look here.

19/10/2011 by Scheong

The Sound of Music: The True Story of the Family Von Trapp

Love it or loathe it, sing along or plug your ears and scream, the famous Broadway musical and 1965 movie, ‘The Sound of Music‘, is one of the most famous stories ever recorded and told to the world.

…Wait.

…Recorded? By who?

Although famous for its Hollywood recreation, the true story of the Von Trapp Family, as recorded by Maria Von Trapp herself, is far deeper than the version we see on the screen or watch on the stage. That’s what this posting is about.

Wait. What…It’s REAL?

Yes. It is real. The Von Trapps were an actual Austrian family. There really was a Maria. There really was a captain. And there really were seven children. They really did leave Austria and they really did sing. The Von Trapp Family is still around today, although they’ve largely relocated to the United States of America. So, what parts of the movie-version of their exploits are actually part of their real story? After all, it was their real-life story that inspired the play and the movie. So; what’s fact and what’s fiction? Let’s find out…

“How Do You Solve A Problem like Maria?”

Was there actually a Maria Von Trapp? Did she live in a convent? Was she a nun? Did she become a governess and marry the captain?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes and…Yes.

The real Maria was born Maria Augusta Kutschera on the 26th of January, 1905. She came into the world in a hurry. She didn’t even wait for her mother to get to the hospital…instead, she was born on the train on the way to the Austrian capital of Vienna!

Maria A. Kutschera graduated from the State Teacher’s College of Progressive Education in Vienna, Austria, at the age of 18, wanting to become a teacher or a tutor. The year was 1923. Fate took her down another path, however, and she decided to become a nun at Nonnberg Abbey, just outside the city of Salzburg. While still at the abbey, she took up the post of schoolmistress there and started educating local children.

Nonnberg Abbey, Salzburg, Austria

In 1922, a lady named Agathe Whitehead died, leaving a husband and seven children. In fact, it was one of her children, her daughter (also named Agathe) who killed her, so to speak. Agathe the daughter contracted Scarlet Fever, but survived. She unfortunately passed the disease onto her mother, who died. Leaving her husband without a wife and her children without a mother.

Who was her husband? Captain Georg Von Trapp.

With his wife dead and his daughter still recovering from fever, Georg was desperate for another woman in the house. Someone who could teach Agathe her lessons while she was recuperating from her illness at home. He wrote to Nonnberg Abbey and they sent him…Maria. It’s now 1926 and Agathe has been sick for four years.

Maria was never engaged by the captain to become a governess, as the movie portrays. She was actually engaged as a tutor for the sick daughter, Agathe. And Maria was not the sweet girl seen in the movie. She was a lot firmer with children (as a schoolmistress probably had to be), but she did eventually grow to love Captain Von Trapp. In fact, as time passed, they grew to love each other so much that they decided to prove it in the bedroom. That proof meant that they then had to get married, and they did, on the 26th of November, 1927. Maria was a mere 22 years old, to the captain’s 47, and she was expecting her first baby.

Captain Von Trapp

Captain Von Trapp. The harsh, grumpy, strict, grouchy old man portrayed on the screen by Christopher Plummer. Who was he, really?

He was born Georg Ludwig Ritter Von Trapp on the 4th of April, 1880. Only ‘Ritter’ isn’t one of his names. It’s actually his title. Translated into English, it means ‘Knight’. Georg’s father, August Trapp, was a successful naval officer in the Austo-Hungarian Navy and his actions at sea had been rewarded with a knighthood for him and his descendants. Thereafter, all members of the Trapp Family were styled ‘Von Trapp’.

Georg followed his father into the Navy, while his brother Werner joined the army. He died in 1915 during the First World War. Georg was more fortunate and he led a long and distinguished naval career during the First World War. As a U-boat captain, he sunk or captured over a dozen enemy vessels.

For his actions, Georg was promoted and he retired from the sea with the rank of Korvettenkapitan (‘Corvette Captain’) and a Knight’s Cross medal for valour. The Central Powers lost the Great War and the Austo-Hungarian Empire was broken up. Austria-Hungary became just Austria, losing its coastline and therefore, its navy. Capt. Von Trapp was out of a job.

Georg married his first wife, Agathe Whitehead in 1911. She came from a wealthy family and her fortune allowed Georg and Agatha to start a family. She died in 1922 of scarlet fever.

The Von Trapp Children

There really were seven Von Trapp Children, but their names are not the same as the ones used in the movie and play. In real life, they were…

Werner Von Trapp (1911-2007) – “Kurt” in the movie.
Rupert Von Trapp (1911-1992) – “Friedrich” in the movie.
Agathe Von Trapp (1913-2010) – “Liesel” in the movie.
Maria Von Trapp (1914-Present) – “Louisa” in the movie.
Hedwig Von Trapp (1917-1972) – “Brigitta” in the movie.
Johanna Von Trapp (1919-1994) – “Marta” in the movie.
Martina Von Trapp (1921-1951) – “Gretl” in the movie.

Originally, Maria the tutor was employed purely to teach Agathe so that she wouldn’t fall behind in her schoolwork, but she eventually married the captain and added a further three children to the Von Trapp family, bringing the total number of kids up to TEN (but more about that later).

The Von Trapp Family Singers

The Von Trapp Family really did sing. And just like in the movie, Capt. Von Trapp was fiercely opposed to the idea of his family singing in public. He thought it was degrading and dishonourable. After all, he came from a wealthy, well-respected Austrian family. To, as it were, ‘sing for their supper’ was considered crass and beggarly. While he supported his children’s singing activities in private (he even taught his daughters how to play the guitar), he refused to allow them to sing in public.

…Until he lost all his money.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Georg Ritter Von Trapp made a disastrous decision.

The death of his first wife had left him a considerable fortune. Big enough for him and his children to live in their own mansion with their own staff and gardens, much like what you see in the movie. But what the movie doesn’t tell you is that all this was kind of a facade. In 1935, the Captain lost almost his entire family fortune. It was originally locked away securely in banks in London. But, feeling sorry for a friend who ran a struggling Austrian bank, he deposited the majority of his money into an account at his friend’s bank. As with a lot of things in the Depression, the bank went bust and nearly all of the Von Trapp fortune was wiped out. Previously opposed to the idea, Capt. Von Trapp now saw that his children’s singing talents could be used to give the family fame and hopefully…their fortune back!

“Edelweiss”

Despite what a lot of people think, the song ‘Edelweiss’ is not an Austrian folk-song. It never was. It was a showtune written in the 1950s by Rodgers & Hammerstein for the 1959 musical ‘The Sound of Music‘.But, what actually is ‘Edelweiss’?

The Edelweiss is actually a flower, from the German words “Edel” (‘Noble’) and “Weiss” (‘White’), or literally, ‘Noble Whiteness’.

The Edelweiss is a pure white flower that grows in cold climates at high altitudes in the German and Austrian Alps. The Edelweiss was used extensively as a symbol by German and Austrian soldiers in both of the World Wars. Because the Edelweiss grows at such inhospitable levels (it’s not found in altitudes below 2,000 meters), wearing an Edelweiss was seen as a sign of determination and strength, since the only way to get the flower was to climb the Alps personally and get one.

The Salzburg Festival

There really was a Salzburg music festival, just like the one in the film, and just like in the film, the real Von Trapp Family entered the conpetition. They needed the money badly. The loss of their fortune meant that they had to fire all their servants. They also had to rent out half of their villa to try and generate extra income. The family lived upstairs and the ground floor was used as a boarding-house.

After being discovered, the family toured Austria during the late 1930s, giving concerts where-ever they went. Things were looking up for the Von Trapps. They travelled around Europe, moving from city to city, country to country, earning a living; a necessity, now that the family fortune was gone. But the longer the Von Trapps stayed in Europe (especially Austria), the more uneasy they grew about the rise of Nazism, especially Captain Von Trapp, who was a firm anti-Nazi.

“So Long, Farewell…”

In the movie, the Von Trapps flee Austria after the music festival, hiding in the abbey before driving off into the night and hiking over the mountains into Switzerland and freedom. They were being hunted by the Nazis after all and Georg was likely to be drafted into the German Navy. But was that how it really happened?

No.

After the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria to Germany), the Von Trapp family felt increasingly nervous. Captain Von Trapp was a fierce anti-Nazi and he didn’t want to join a Nazi Navy, no matter what kind of salary, title or rank the Germans could offer him, and they had sent him job-offers, which he repeatedly turned down. As far as he was concerned, he was an Austrian and he lived in Austria. Not Germany. He had absolutely no allegiance and no obligation to Germany at all, and that was how it was going to stay. Increasingly uneasy with Nazism and the changing political landscape, the Von Trapps no longer felt safe in Austria and they decided that they just had to leave. So, they packed up their bags and got on the train.

…That’s right. The train.

But how is this possible? If you remember the movie, you’ll remember that the Austrian border was closed and that they can’t get out. But in a twist of fate and using a bit of legal trickery, the Von Trapps were able to leave Austria quite legitimately. How?

Well…It has to do with Capt. Von Trapp’s birth.

See, Capt. Von Trapp was born in the Kingdom of Dalmatia, once part of the larger Austro-Hungarian Empire. To be specific, he was born in the Dalmatian capital city of Zadar. In 1918, Zadar was annexed to Italy. Because Captain Von Trapp was born in Zadar, he could now claim Italian citizenship…as could the rest of his family.

He took advantage of this and so all his family had to do, as Italian citizens, was hop on a train going from Austria to Italy. Easy, huh?

Once they arrived in Italy, the Von Trapps boarded a steamship and sailed first for London, and then for the United States. According to Maria Von Trapp in an interview with her onscreen persona, Julie Andrews, the crossing from England to America took three weeks (22 days exactly), and Maria knew almost no English (although she quickly became fluent during her years in America).

The Von Trapps in America

In the U.S.A., the Von Trapp Family became famous for their singing and they toured America and Europe extensively before the outbreak of WWII. During and after the war, despite their Austrian background, they continued to sing and perform and when the war was over, they even set up charities to help Austrian civilians who had been displaced by the war.

After being pestered repeatedly by friends, Maria Von Trapp wrote down her family’s exploits in a memoir published in 1949. It was this memoir, “The Story of the Von Trapp Family Singers“, that was used for the Broadway musical and the world-famous movie in the 1950s and 60s.

In 1942, the Von Trapp Family moved to the city of Stowe in Vermont (where some of them still live). In 1950, they opened the Trapp Family Lodge, a ski-lodge and holiday resort which was the family home and business. It’s still run by the Von Trapp Family today. On the 20th of December, 1980, the lodge caught fire and burnt to the ground. The Von Trapp family and all the lodge-guests (but one) managed to escape the inferno, including Maria Von Trapp. The destruction of the family lodge allowed the Von Trapps to rebuild it as a traditional Austrian ski-lodge, reminiscent of their homeland.

The Von Trapp Family Today

So whatever became of the Von Trapp Family? Who lived? Who died? When did they stop singing?

Capt. Georg Ritter Von Trapp died in 1947 from cancer. Maria Von Trapp died in 1987 from heart-failure. Of the seven children from the captain’s first marriage, only one (his daughter Maria) is still alive. Of the captain’s three additional children by Maria, all of them are still living. Johannes Von Trapp (the youngest of the ten original Von Trapp Family Singers from the 1930s and 40s) manages the family lodge in Vermont.

The original Von Trapp Family Singers broke up in 1957, but believe it or not, descendants of the Von Trapp Family are still singing, recording and performing today.

The Von Trapp Children (Justin, Amanda, Melanie and Sofia, collectively called ‘JAMS’) are an a’capella group and they are direct descendants of the original Von Trapp Family Singers. Their great-grandparents are Capt. Georg Von Trapp and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead. Their grandfather, Werner Von Trapp, died in 2007. They originally started singing as a treat for their grandfather, but after his death, became a professional singing-group, giving concerts and going on tours. Their repetoire includes religious songs, folk-music, a’capella songs and of course…selections from the musical, ‘The Sound of Music‘.

Throughout History

A blog about antiques and history!

Things You Didn’t Know About…Winston Churchill

Pearl Harbor: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy

The History of the Collared Shirt

Fountain Pens and Flexible Nibs

The House of the Dragon Throne: Imperial China and the Forbidden City

The Killing Fields – Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge

Men’s Hats: A Brief History & A Look at the Hat in the 21st Century

Victoria and the Kensington System

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: