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Trousers with Metalwork – The History of Modern Denim Jeans

 

Jeans. Blue jeans. Demin jeans. Love them or loathe them, these sturdy blue trousers are here to stay. In the 21st century, almost everyone wears jeans, even your humble blogger here, grudgingly though he might, yes, he does wear jeans.

I’ll admit it. Jeans are not my first preference for legwear. But they do have their time and they do have their place. And even more interestingly, they also have their history. Where did jeans come from? How long have they been around? Why are they called ‘Jeans’? And what is denim, anyway? Why are they riveted together like the Golden Gate Bridge and what is the purpose of that tiny pocket in the corner?

Deminmental Developments

Almost all jeans on earth are made from a material called denim. What is it and where did it come from? Denim is actually a cotton fabric, although it probably feels very different than the singlet or the T-shirt that you’re wearing right now. The reason for this is because denim is woven differently, to give it strength and the ability to put up with all kinds of rugged use, misuse and tortoruous abuse. Although this isn’t set in stone, the majority of denim comes in a stereotypical blue colour. This is achieved by dying the denim in an indigo-blue dye which, when dry, turns the denim a dark blue, which eventually fades lighter and lighter as the years and wash-cycles in your washing-machine, gradually wear down the colour of the dye over the years.

But probably most importantly…where does the name ‘denim’ come from?

The original super-strong denim fabric was actually a type of serge manufactured in France. Named after the town where this particular type of cloth was produced, the material became known as Serge de Nimes, (‘Nimes’ being a town in France). Eventually, the word was shortened, broken down, rebuilt and Serge de Nimes…became…Serge de Nimes…Denim.

The History of Modern Jeans

Inventing the material and the distinctive blue hue was one thing. Finding out what the hell to DO with this fascinating fabric was another.

Jeans were invented in the mid-19th century. The robust, easily-washed denim fabric was just what tailors needed to manufacture trousers for the working man that were strong, hard-wearing and which could put up with such rigorous occupations such as farming, ranching, mining, construction-work and general hard labour. It was into this world of hard-wearing clothing that a man named Levi Strauss entered in the 1850s.

Strauss was born in Bavaria, Germany, in 1829. The home of beer, sausages and in a hundred years from then, BMW. Soon, Bavaria would be able to lay claim as being the birthplace of the guy who brought us modern jeans.

In 1847, Strauss, his mother and sisters sailed to the New World and settled in the United States of America. In 1853, Strauss found himself in the rapidly-expanding city of San Francisco, where he founded his famous Levi Strauss company, manufacturing blue-jeans. In the 1850s, California was undergoing a massive gold-rush, and miners and prospectors would have needed sturdy clothing which could put up with rock-scrapes, water, mud, snags from pickaxes and shovels and a whole lot more. Strauss was in the right place at the right time.

Fantastic as denim was for making jeans, Strauss soon discovered that the jeans were only as strong as the seams which held them together. One of Strauss’s customers was a man named Jacob Davis, who moved to San Francisco in the 1860s, shortly after the end of the American Civil War. Davis was a tailor by profession, and he had experimented with copper rivets, which he used when he made things like harnesses, hammocks and tents, to give them extra strength. Excellent as Herr Strauss’s trousers were, Davis found that, in spite of denim’s strength, the trousers kept ripping from all the hard work they had to do. In an experiment, Davis applied rivets to all the stress-areas on the jeans, in an effort to strengthen them – On the pocket-edges, around the fly, at the hips and so-forth.

When this experiment proved to be successful, Davis decided to take out a patent on his new invention. When he discovered he didn’t have the money to apply for a patent, he approached Strauss with his discovery instead. Strauss agreed to help Davis fund his patent and in the 1870s, the two men formed a partnership, creating their new and improved blue-jeans!

“Jeans” actually comes from the French words “Bleu de Genes” (literally “Blue of Genoa”).

Blue Jeans Today

The history of jeans is long and interesting. Originally, they weren’t even called jeans! Up until 1960, Levi Strauss called his creation “waist overalls”. Unlike conventional overalls, that went right up from your ankles to your chest with straps to go over your shoulders, “waist overalls” merely went up to your waist, where they were held up by either a belt or suspenders. Jeans have remained popular as a working-man’s set of trousers because of their toughness. During wartime, factory-workers often wore denim jeans because they guarded against dangerous liquids, sparks and other hazards that were to be found inside places like production-lines and munitions factories.

Because of their status as working-trouserse, jeans were often looked down on in polite society. It wasn’t until after the middle of the 20th century that dress-codes were relaxed enough to allow the wearing of jeans as regular trousers. Restaurants, cinemas and nightclubs would sometimes ban patrons from entering if they were attired in jeans because they weren’t seen as respectable. It’s believed that jeans started being worn as regular trousers in the 1960s and 70s, when teenagers, rebellious as always, looked for something more interesting to wear, apart from suits and slacks. Some boys probably found their fathers’ old 1940s jeans in his closet, which he wore as a factory-worker during the War and put them on, and the trend began.

The Enigmatic Fifth Pocket

Nearly all modern jeans have five pockets. Two at the back, one on the front left, and two on the front right, with the fifth pocket nestled neatly inside the front right pocket. What is it there for?

Popular belief will tell you it’s for keys, condoms, loose-change, cellphones, cigarette-lighters, boxes of matches or chewing-gum, but it’s actually not for any of those at all.

The fifth pocket was introduced to blue jeans around the turn of the century and their original purpose was to hold a pocket-watch. Although this may seem hard to believe (what with the shape of fifth-pockets on jeans in the 21st century), it is, nonetheless…true. A classic pair of jeans, such as Levi 501s, will typically have a fifth pocket which is comparatively large, compared with some others that can be found today, and the reason for that is because it was designed to hold pocket-watches. Even today, most good-sized jeans which are manufactured to traditional measurements will still be able to house quite comfortably, a 16-size pocket-watch, with the watch’s ring-clip chain clipping to the nearest belt-loop around the front of your jeans. If anyone reading this owns a pocket-watch and wants to try this out…go ahead. It does work. Here’s the proof:

That’s actually a closeup of me wearing my own jeans! The chain is a gold-plated, ring-clip watch-chain, clipped to the belt-loop, with my railroad pocket-watch tucked into the fifth pocket. So the next time someone asks you what that pocket is for…you can tell them!

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Sweeney Todd and the Persistence of Fears and Legends

 

Sweeney Todd is one of the most famous people in the world, his legendary status is up there with Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper and George W. Bush. This demonic, insane barber of Victorian-era London who loved slitting the throats of his victims with a straight-razor and sending them sliding down through a trapdoor into the basement of the pie-shop below, run by his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, has been famous for over a hundred years as one of the most bloodthirsty serial-killers in the world.

But did he ever exist?

The recent Johnny Depp film of a couple of years back, entitled “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” was an amazing success, but was any of the story ever based on fact? Or is it just the concoction of a lively and grusome imagination? This article will explore the world of Todd, the truths, the facts, the falsehoods and lies.

Sweeney Todd: The Man

Sweeney Todd, the insane barber. A real person or a figment of imagination?

Sorry to disappoint the more bloodthirsty readers out there, but Sweeney Todd was not a real person. As far as reliable historical records and research have uncovered, a man named Sweeney Todd never existed. Possibilities that Todd was in fact based on a real serial-killer by a different name are equally unlikely. Examinations of legal records from courthouses such as the Old Bailey in London have concluded that Todd was little more than a Victorian-era urban legend. If Todd was, or was based on a real person, pieces of evidence to support this are either few and far between and of questionable repute, or never existed at all.

Sweeney Todd: The Myth

If Sweeney Todd never existed, either as a person himself, or as an alias for another person, then how did he come about?

Sweeney Todd was ‘born’ in 1846. He was the subject of a short story called “The String of Pearls”, which was published as a ‘penny dreadful’ during the early Victorian-era. Penny dreadfuls were exactly what they sounded like – cheap, short stories or novels which were just…dreadful…to read. These short stories were printed on news-rag and their plots were usually dark, lurid, erotic and morbid…all the things that respectable publishing-houses of the time refused to run through their printing-presses.

Sweeney Todd’s method of killing was to slit his victims in a specially-constructed barber’s chair. By pulling a lever or pressing a foot-pedal with his shoe, Todd could make the chair tilt over, tipping his victims down a trapdoor into a basement below. The drop would make the victims break their necks. After they were dead, the bodies were then processed into meat pies, to be sold by Todd’s partner-in-crime, Mrs. Lovett, in her pie-shop, in the most hardcore example of food-adulteration in the world.

Over the next century and a half, the public lapped up Sweeney Todd. There plays made about him, books written about him and at least two films with him as the main character. Although Todd himself never existed, I think one reason why the story lasted so long and was so popular among the Victorians was because it concentrated on elements of daily life that would have been very familiar to men reading the ‘Todd’ stories back in the 1840s and 50s.

Elements of Sweeney’s Legend

Although Sweeney Todd wasn’t real, even though he was only a murderer on ink and paper, the fear and horror he generated and continues to generate to this day, is due mostly to mankind’s combined fears of two things, which Todd did much to excacerbate: The straight-razor and food-adulteration. Almost singlehandedly, Todd turned what was once a finely-crafted blade into a cold, hard killing-utensil, and made all our fears of “mystery meat” a reality, so to speak. But what was the reality of these things back in Victorian times? Did people really turn people into pies and serve them for lunch?

Shaving with a Straight Razor

If Sweeney Todd did one thing at all, he made the straight-razor the fearsome, lethal, morbid and terrifying throat-slitting, blood-gushing murder-utensil that we know it for today, capable of ending life in a second with nothing more than a quick draw across the flesh. Now people are just terrified of these things, aren’t they? Show someone a gun and they start looking all over it, touching it, staring at it, examining it minutely. Show someone a straight-razor and they’ll hand over their wallets so fast they’d get leather-burn on their fingers. Popular culture and Sweeney Todd has ingrained in mankind that straight-razors are horrific, dangerous knives which only highly skilled professionals or insane barbers would ever dare apply to their faces. But how much of all this whazzoolally is actually fact?

Straight-razors are extremely sharp, there’s no doubt about that. They would be useless for their intended purpose (uh…shaving, folks. Don’t forget, they are razors!) if they were not, but the chances of actually cutting yourself with a straight-razor, or having someone else cut you with a straight-razor, if it was used as a razor, are actually rather minimal, provided of course that the razor is ready for shaving. The reason for this is because the angle of the blade required to cut hair and the sheer lack of pressure applied to the blade-edge would make slitting your throat highly unlikely. Furthermore, the slick, lubricated surface of prepared, lathered skin means that the open blade slides across your skin’s lubricated surface, it doesn’t scrape across dry skin, cutting into it. Straight-razors are used in smooth, sweeping vertical strokes, edge-leading, spine-following, not in side-to-side slitting, slashing horizontal movements! With enough practice, a steady hand and a sufficiently honed and stropped blade, you can soon gain enough proficiency to shave to perfection with a straight-razor. It’s not that hard.

Today, few people shave with a straight-razor…which is a pity, because in today’s waste-conscious, green-worrying world, a straight-razor is the ultimate in long-lasting bathroom accessories. You sharpen it, strop it, shave with it and then just continue honing and stropping it and shaving with it throughout the rest of your life, never having to buy another razor ever again. Apart from looking amazingly cool, shaving with a straight-razor saves you a lot of money, believe me!


Sweeney Todd’s seven-piece straight-razor set from the movie “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”. While most straight-razors are sold on their own, if you can afford it, you could…and still can…buy a seven-piece razor-set, with a different blade for each day of the week

Of course, there were people back in the Victorian-era who couldn’t shave themselves, for various reasons. Maybe they didn’t own a razor, or they didn’t have the skills necessary to shave themselves. This was where the barber came in. The unshaven man would visit the barber, who was (and still is) the only professional man qualified to give anothe person a shave. Barbers used to be trained in the art of shaving and were expected to be able to give smooth, quick, bloodless shaves as part of their training. The barber would prepare the man’s face by softening it with hot water and a towel, brush on the lathered shaving-soap and then start the steady and methodic task of shaving. Lying back defenselessly in a barber’s chair while a man stood over you with nothing less than three-and-a-half inches of steely, ice-cold metallic death in his hands was probably enough to scare anyone, and it was this fear that Sweeney Todd preyed on, and to this day, many people are terrified to shave with straight-razors, even though they’re actually no more dangerous than a cartridge-razor.

Food Adulteration in Victorian England

The other big fear that Sweeney Todd generated was that of food adulteration. Food-adulteration is the process of making food out of unsuitable or substandard products. Although we like to think that food back in the old days was fresh-baked, fresh-picked, fresh-harvested and free from preservatives, pesticides and additives, colours and all that stuff…the truth was significantly more different.

Until the late 19th century, food-adulteration and contamination was rife in Victorian-era England. Almost anything was used to make anything else and anything else was advertised as anything the customer wished it to be. If the customer wanted to believe it was ice-cream…it was ice-cream…not paint, sugar, milk, cream and ice blended to look like ice-cream (which it could very well have been!).

One of the key elements of the Sweeney Todd legend is that his victims were processed and turned into meat pies. Although I’ve found no records or information that Victorians ever served up cannibalistic culinary creations such as this, what is known for sure and certain is that the Victorians were notorious for serving contaminated food. There were precious few health-laws in the 19th century, and there were even fewer laws governing food and drink. Because of this, unscrupulous vendors could sell absolutely horrific grub to the public with the public being none the wiser. It was estimated that in the mid-1800s, over half the food sold by food-hawkers in London was contaminated. How contaminated?

Toffee sold to children could contain lice, fleas, hair and sawdust.
Tea-leaves could be recycled, dried, redarkened with ink and resold as “fresh” tea.
Mustard could contain lead.
Chocolate could contain mercury.
Milk was watered down, and then rewhitened with chalk.
Cheese that was mouldy could be covered with paint to make it look fresh.
Butter, gin and bread all had varying amounts of copper added to it, to give it that fresh, yellow appearance.
Chalk was also added to bread to whiten it, due to the high price of flour.
Beer was watered-down with water or even vitriol! What is vitriol you ask? Consult your highschool science-teacher. ‘Vitriol’ (also called ‘Oil of Vitriol’) was a Victorian English term for the compound known today as…sulphuric acid! Eugh!

These, and hundreds of other atrocities far too numerous to mention here, were all commonplace in Victorian England and would have been horrors that Victorians who were familiar with the stories of Sweeney Todd, would become increasingly aware of as the years rolled by. The first act of British parliament to try and control food-adulteration came out in 1860. It wasn’t very strongly enforced though, and was largely ignored by those whose job it was to uphold the law. It wasn’t until 1875 and the passage of the ‘Sale of Food & Drugs’ act that proper laws regarding hygeine of food and drink were brought into permanent and practical effect.

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“There Will Be No Escapes from This Camp!” The Story of the Great Escape

 

Green fields. A road. Then, a convoy of motorcycles with sidecars, automobiles and large trucks break onto the scene. Dozens of vehicles driving towards a sprawling, fenced-in compound, the ultimate wartime elementary-school summer camp.

Or that’s how Hollywood portrayed it, anyway.

The Great Escape is one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. It was a daring and ballsy attempt by nearly a thousand Allied POWs to smuggle nearly three hundred prisoners out of Stalag Luft III in Poland, and get them to Allied countries or in touch with resistance-movements and to disrupt the German war-effort. Most people who are familiar with this story will probably only know the Hollywood version with Steve McQueen and his famous motorcycle border-jump and that catchy, militaristic theme-tune. But what was the truth behind it? What was the Great Escape really like and what was it about? What happened and how was it done?

This article explores and details the history of one of the greatest events and greatest escapes of the Second World War.

Stalag Luft III, Sagan, Poland

Stammlager Luft III. Prisoner of War Camp for Allied Airmen #3. This is where it all took place. This is where it happened. And this was the event that would make this prison-camp the most famous German prison-camp outside of Auschwitz. But what was it and where was it located? And what did it hold?

“Stalag Luft III” as it was more commonly known, was a POW camp specifically constructed for the internment of Allied airmen. It was a massive complex, with dozens of huts, miles of barbed wire, watchtowers, delousing chambers, officers’ quarters, a ‘cooler’, a theatre and of course…thousands of prisoners. It was watched over by hundreds of German guards, all of whom had been specially selected for the task. Stalag Luft III was meant to be the most comfortable, relaxing and peaceful POW camp in German-occupied Europe. It was also meant to be the most escape-proof. The Germans had designed the camp so that the Allied enemies could just sit back, relax and wait for the war to end, and thereby keep their mind off of escaping.

Stalag Luft III held the most escape-hungry of all the Allied POW airmen. As it was said in the film, “We have put all our rotten eggs in one basket. And we intend to watch this basket carefully“. The only problem with putting all your rotten eggs in one basket is that soon, the stink becomes intolerable. With all the brightest and brainiest of POW airmen in one place, it was probably rather obvious that soon, instead of being the ultimate escape-proof camp, the Germans had done nothing but created the world’s biggest challenge to the world’s smartest group of escape-artists. And with nothing but time on their hands, these escape-artists were going to make the Germans look like total idiots.

Anti-Escape Measures

To try and dissuade the Allies from escaping from Stalag Luft III, their German captors had put in a number of anti-escape measures to make their camp as ‘escape-proof’ as possible. These included…

– Several barbed wire fences.
– Microphones buried underground to detect tunnelling.
– Huts raised on stilts to prevent access to the ground for tunnelling.
– A clear zone between the camp and the forest that surrounded the camp.
– A clear zone between the huts and the perimeter fences.
– Watchtowers with searchlights and armed guards.
– A “trip-wire” that ran around the inner perimeter of the camp. Stepping over the warning-wire resulted in a warning-shot by one of the guards.
– Locating the camp on an area of land with very sandy subsoil. Any tunnelling would be immediately obvious due to the yellow sand contrasting with the grey, dusty topsoil. Furthermore, the crumbly, dry sand would cave in if the prisoners tried to dig tunnels.

Plans of Escape

During the Second World War, there were hundreds of escape-attempts from German prison-camps by Allied POWs, but very few of these were ever successful. In 1943, Roger Bushell, a South-African born Englishman who was a fighter-pilot with the RAF, decided to hatch a plan. It would be the most amazing and daring escape-plan in the history of the Second World War. And it was all his idea.

Bushell knew that escapees had a very small chance of ever actually getting home. The German anti-escape network was extensive, and any escaped prisoners would more than likely be recaptured. His plan therefore was not to actually get people home (although it would be awesome if that happened), but rather to disrupt the German war-effort. With hundreds of German troops searching for escaped POWs, it would cause a massive lag in the German war-effort and thereby give the Allies some small chance in winning the war that little bit sooner.

To pull off this ‘master plan’, Bushell and his fellow POWs decided that they would wait until they were taken to this new “Stalag Luft III” (which started taking in prisoners in 1942) before digging to victory. The new camp was so “escape-proof” that the Germans would never expect the Allies to try and break out of it, which is exactly what Bushell wanted them to think.

Bushell’s plan was to get out as many prisoners as possible. He set a total escapee-number of 250 men. To get this number of men out of the camp, he would require an escape-committee (a group of POWs whose job it was to handle proposed escape-ideas) unlike any other. It consisted of hundreds of men doing almost anything you could imagine to aid prisoners in their escapes. They manufactured civilian clothes, they forged travel-documents, they created maps, passports, knives, wirecutters, compasses and countless other things! But…they also dug the escape-tunnels.

Preparing the Tunnels

If the Great Escape was famous for anything at all, it was its sheer scale of operation. Most tunnels were just a few feet below the surface and a few hundred yards long. The tunnels of the Great Escape would be massive! And there wouldn’t be just one of them, either.

There would be three tunnels in the Great Escape, codenamed “Tom”, “Dick”, and “Harry”. Bushell said he would court-martial anyone who dared say the name ‘Tunnel’. The tunnels were Tom, Dick and Harry, and they would only ever be referred to as Tom, Dick and Harry.

Of course, wanting to dig three escape tunnels is ambitious enough. But trying to hide three escape-tunnels is even harder. The Germans had a group of guards called “Ferrets”, whose job it was to ‘ferret’ out tunnels and escape-attempts. That was what they were there for, and that was the only thing that they were there to do. To hide the tunnels from the ferrets, their entrances had to be exceptionally well-hidden.

The tunnels were dug from three different huts in the North Compound of Stalag Luft III. There were fifteen huts in North Compound, they numbered 101-112 (ommitting #111) and 119-123. The tunnels were dug from huts 123 (Tom), 122 (Dick) and 104 (Harry). 123 was selected because it was an outside hut, and it was as close to the barbed wire as any other hut in the camp. 122 was selected because it was an inside hut, further away from the wire. Its distance from the wire meant that it was unlikely to be an escape-hut, and therefore the Germans wouldn’t suspect it as much. Both Tom and Dick would be dug in a westerly direction. Hut 104, at the northern end of the camp, would be dug in a northerly direction, going under two barbed wire fences and the camp “Cooler”, which was a slang-term for “Prison”, the camp prison where misbehaving POWs were sent to “cool off” (hence the name) after causing a disruption.

Having selected the huts that would house the tunnel-entrances, the prisoners then had to create the entrances themselves! This was far from easy. The huts were raised off the ground on stilts, to discourage tunnelling, and there were only a few places in the huts where there was contact with the ground. Each dormitory room inside each of the huts had a concrete foundation for the woodburning stove on which the prisoners could cook their food and warm their rooms in winter. There were also concrete foundations for each of the bathroom-blocks at the end of each hut, housing drains and showers. Only in these places could tunnels be dug, by breaking through the concrete into the soil and sand below. But, having broken the surface, the tunnel-entrances then had to be disguised so that German ferrets, who conducted regular hut-searches to find escape-tunnels, would never find them.

The disguised entrances to the tunnels were as ingenious as the tunnels themselves. The entrance to ‘Tom’ was in a dark corner of a room in 123 with concrete foundations. Only with bright and powerful lights would the Germans ever manage to find the outline of the trapdoor entrance to the tunnel.

‘Dick’s entrance was in the bathroom of hut 122. This one was really something. In the middle of the hut’s bathroom was a large, square drain, about two feet square. Beneath the grille was a drainage-pipe in the wall of the drainshaft, but the pipe wasn’t right at the bottom of this shaft, which meant that there was always two feet of stagnant water inside the drainshaft which the pipe couldn’t remove. The prisoners pulled off the square grille, bailed out the water and cut away the concrete bottom of the shaft and started digging the tunnel through there. If the ferrets started tunnel-hunting, the prisoners tossed the concrete bottom of the drainshaft back in, sealed it to make it watertight, put the drainage grille back on and tipped a bucket of water down the drain and the Germans would never suspect a thing.

‘Harry’s entrance was underneath the stove in one of the rooms in hut 104. The stove was set on top of a square, tiled platform which itself was above the concrete foundation. The prisoners moved the stove and hoisted up the platform and put hinges in it, to make the trapdoor. They broke away the concrete foundation underneath to gain entrance to their tunnel and then put the tiled platform back on top and put the stove on top of that. To prevent the ferrets from tampering with the stove, the prisoners kept a fire burning in it all day long.

Digging the Tunnels

On the 11th of April, 1943, all the tunnel entrances had been picked and in the days and weeks afterwards, tunnelling began.

Digging the tunnels was an ambitious task for many reasons. One of the main reasons was their sheer length! Every tunnel had to have a shaft that went down thirty feet (nine meters). The shaft would be two feet square, shored up by scraps of wood all the way down, with a ladder nailed to one side. The tunnels were excavated using makeshift trowels made from “Klim” tins. “Klim” was the powdered milk that the International Red Cross sent to the camp. The name is actually just “Milk” written backwards. Tins of ‘Klim’ weighed exactly a pound when full, so the prisoners would have been shovelling about half a pound to a pound of soil with every scoop of their Klim trowels.


‘Harry’s entrance-shaft. Thirty feet all the way to the bottom

Disposing of the yellow subsoil was tricky. The prisoners couldn’t just tip it out the window, because it would clash so obviously with the grey topsoil that it would be visible from a mile away. The prisoners came up with all kinds of ingenous ways to dispose of it as discreetly as possible. They dug gardens outside each of their huts. The mixed up soil from the gardens would easily conceal the yellow subsoil and the ferrets would never notice anything. To get the tunnel sand to the gardens, the prisoners created their own sand-dispersement system. Using a pair of long johns underwear, the prisoners created the ultimate in discreet sand-dispodal devices. They filled the long-johns with sand as it came out of the tunnel and then the “Penguins” as the sand-dispersers were known, would head out to find a garden or an already-disturbed area of land and deposit their little loads there.

The bottoms of the long-johns were held shut by pins which had strings tied to them. When the ‘Penguins’ wanted to empty their sand, they pulled on the strings (which were accessed by holes in the pockets of their trousers), releasing the pins, which let the sand pour out of their long-johns (worn inside their trousers), down over their shoes onto the ground. Using mainly this method, the ‘Penguins’ managed to disperse over 200 tons of sand.

Shoring (supporting and bracing) the tunnel walls and rooves, as well as the shafts, was essential. The soft, dry, shifting sand and the great depths at which the prisoners worked meant that it would have been impossible to dig the tunnels without them caving in constantly, a great hazard so many feet below the surface. The prisoners shored up the tunnels with whatever scrapwood they could find. Most of the shoring came from their beds and tables. Bed-slats, table-legs, chair-legs, planks, skirting boards and whatever other scrap wood they could find was sacrificed for the sake of the tunnels. The wood-shortage became so bad that one of the prisoners started weaving hammocks for the men to sleep in because their beds had run out of bedboards to rest their mattresses on!


Diagram of the completed escape-tunnel, ‘Harry’, from Hut 104

Digging the tunnels was a major challenge, filled with innumerable dangers, which were resolved with increasingly ingenious devices. To keep the air fresh in the tunnels, the prisoners constructed manual air-pumps using wooden boxes, kit-bags (for the bellows), table-tennis paddles and Klim tins, sealed end-to-end to make the long, metal air-pipes. Chambers were dug underground to store important documents, money and clothing, as well as to provide space for the air-pump and the prisoner in charge of operating it. To speed up the removal of sand, a railroad was installed, with wooden tracks nailed to the floorboards of the tunnel. Little flat cars ran along the rails, carrying containers of sand and the rail-cars were pulled back and forth by long lengths of string by men at the tunnel-shaft and the men at the face.


The underground railroad. The tunnel is two feet wide by two feet high. Blankets were nailed over the wooden railroad lines to muffle the sounds of the railcars running along them

Illumination in the tunnels was essential. Prisoners made simple oil-lamps out of fat, pyjama-cords (for wicks) and of course…Klim tins to form the bodies of the lamps. Eventually, up to a thousand feet of electrical wiring was smuggled down the tunnels and hooked up to the camp’s electrical grid, giving the tunnels full electric lighting.

Escape-Aids and How they were Made

Digging the tunnels was just one small part of the escape-operation. Once out of the camp, the escaped prisoners would need a whole heap of equipment to help them find their way to freedom. Secretive workshops were set up all over the camp, making almost anything and everything that the prisoners would need to help them in their escapes. POWs with a flair for clothing, or who had a background in the clothing industry set up a tailor-shop, using whatever cloth they could find (as well as spare uniforms) to create civilian suits. All POWs were imprisoned wearing their military uniforms, so escaping into the world outside the camp still wearing them was not an option. Templates for suits and other clothing were cut out of newspaper and the tailors measured up over two hundred suits and other articles of clothing.

Along with clothing, the prisoners also required paperwork. Crossing German-Occupied Europe was not so much about the right people to know, but also the right papers to carry. Mostly through pickpocketing the guards’ pockets, prisoners stole, forged and copied every single travel-document they could find, from simple passports to business-letters and travel-permits. All the forging was done by hand with dip-pens and bottles of ink. Paper was sourced from the flyleaves of books, dyes were sourced from book-covers soaked in water, or from boot-polish.

The book-cover dyes were used to dye cards and papers certain colours so that they would match the tint of paper on various travel documents. To test their skill, forgers would take two copies of the same document and present them to another prisoner and ask them to pick the fake…more often than not, both documents were forged.

Compasses, necessary for the men to find their way across the European countryside, were manufactured from gramophone-records. The records were melted down and poured and pressed into a mould. Glass for the compass-tops were sourced from windows and the compass-needles were ordinary sewing-needles which were magnetised.

Bribing the Guards

Surprisingly, a great deal of the stuff that the prisoners required was actually obtained through the very guards that were trying to stop them escaping. Either through trickery, thievery, blackmail or bribery, the POWs managed to get what they needed from the guards. Camp ‘currency’ was stuff like cigarettes, coffee, chocolate and anything else that the Allies could get their hands on through the Red Cross or special ‘escape-packages’ sent to them by Secret Service organisations such as MI-9, and which the Germans couldn’t get. These things were such a rarity that it was easy for the POWs to bribe their German captors to get them almost anything that they needed – Documents, money and even a camera, film and developing fluids, which the prisoners used to photograph and develop ID snapshots for their passports. Prisoners got guards to sign receipts for stuff that they had accepted as bribes from the prisoners, which were then used to blackmail them. The POWs would be setnt to the ‘Cooler’ for bad behaviour, but the German guard could risk execution for fraternising with the enemy.

The Great Escape

It took the better part of a year to complete everything that needed to be done. The clothing, documents, money, escape-tools, luggage, food and the tunnels themselves took around six hundred men a year or so to finish. But when it was finished, a date had to be set for the escape.

The prisoners selected the 24th of March, 1944 as their escape-date. Some key, incorruptable guards would be in parts of the camp that were away from the escape-hut and there would be no moon. That evening, prisoners, dressed in civilian clothes and carrying cardboard suitcases, boxes, rolled up blankets and kitbags all prepared themselves for escape.

Things went bad from the start.

To begin with, the weather was terrible. It was the coldest winter in Poland for thirty years. It was so cold that the ground was frozen solid and the prisoners were stuck, digging and hacking away at the last few inches of soil that covered the escape-shaft at the end of the tunnel for nearly an hour. When at last the topsoil was broken through and stars could be seen above, the prisoners discovered their next blunder.

The length of the tunnel and how long it would have to be to reach the safety of the trees was figured out through trigonometry, and it was the camp’s POW surveyors who did all the calculations. The surveyors had screwed up their calculations, and as a result, the mouth of the tunnel was not actually deep inside the woods, it was actually twenty feet short of it, right out in the open! Because of this, any careless prisoners getting out of the tunnel could potentially be spotted by the guards in the camp! The prisoners quickly rigged up an alternative escape-system whereby one prisoner, hiding in the woods, would pull on a rope attached to the ladder in the escape-shaft of the tunnel, to signal to the waiting prisoners when it was safe to come out.

In all, two hundred and fifty men were expecting to escape that night. They were all hidden inside the escape-hut and were told to keep quiet and to talk about nothing except the weather. They were all given numbers and were sent down the tunnel in batches of five or ten men at a time. They were sent along the tunnel lying on their stomachs on top of the flat railcars which were once used to cart out the excavated sand. Roger Bushell had hoped to get a man out of the tunnel every minute or so, but because of the surveying blunder and the necessity to escape much more carefully than had previously been thought, progress in the escape was now frustratingly slow. Problems with the prisoners who had blanket-rolls only added to the bottle-necking problems. The blanket-rolls were ordinary blankets rolled up with all the prisoner’s necesities tucked inside it. The rolled up blanket was tied up with string and the string was slung over the prisoner’s neck and shoulders. The problem was that if the blanket-rolls weren’t rolled and tied properly, they became too bulky and they got jammed inside the two-foot-wide tunnel, causing delays and risking cave-ins. The tunnel-shoring was held up purely by friction and the downward force of the sand…there were no nails or screws to act as a backup.


‘Harry’ today

Things eventually fell into a rhythm of sorts, and the prisoners were able to escape from the camp rather smoothly. Everything went pear-shaped at 5:00am on the 25th of March, though. A guard stumbled across the hole in the earth created by the open mouth of the escape-tunnel (although how it was not discovered sooner was a mystery to some prisoners, as the heat from the tunnel and the chilly air outside meant that there was a column of steam coming up from below!) and blew his whistle and fired warning-shots. The prisoners in the tunnel quickly backed up into the hut while prisoners awaiting escape in the hut were told to start burning their civilian clothing and escape-documents and aids. Prisoners were sent out to the parade-grounds for counting and in the end, it was determined that seventy-six prisoners had escaped.

The Escapees

In terms of escaping from a POW camp during WWII, escaping the camp itself was fairly easy. It was escaping from German-occupied Europe that was hard. Of the seventy-six prisoners who got out, fifty were recaptured and executed, twenty-three were recaptured and sent back to various prison-camps, from Stalag Luft III to Colditz and three escaped to freedom.

When Hitler had heard of the mass-escape of Allied POWs, he flew into a rage. He originally ordered that everyone be shot. Not just the prisoners, but even the camp kommandant and even the guards on duty that night! Hitler’s advisors managed to convince him that such an act would destroy Germany’s reputation in the eyes of the world forever (not like that hadn’t already been done by that point), and advised him to take a less aggressive line of action. Hitler then ordered that “more than half” of the prisoners should be shot.

Orders were sent out and a list was compiled. It was said that all the prisoners that were captured and which were marked for death, were to be told that they’d be driven back to Stalag Luft III, but that on the way, some excuse would be made, usually that the trip would be a long one and that the prisoners (usually in groups of two or three) would be let out of the cars or trucks to have a drink or to relieve their bladders. It would be at this point that the German guards would be instructed to shoot them in the back of the heads. Their bodies would then be cremated to destroy evidence of manner of death, and the message passed on that the prisoners had been “shot while resisting arrest” or that they had attempted “further escape after arrest”.

Although the escape didn’t get everyone home, it did achieve one of its chief aims – To distract the Germans from the war-effort. Paul Brickhill, the famous Australian soldier, POW and writer who penned the original “Great Escape” account in 1950, estimated that at least five MILLION German troops were deployed to track down the escapees, and that most of them were tracking them down full time!

At the end of the war, the British made the arrest and prosecution of all the guards and soldiers who had killed the fifty escapees marked for death, one of their main tasks. Most Germans didn’t want to kill the escapees, they probably didn’t see any real point in it, but they knew that if they didn’t do it, they’d be shot for disobeying orders. The trials for the prosecuted Germans lasted fifty days, one for each of the killed escapees.

Although it wasn’t a total success, although it was a horrific waste of life, although only three out of nearly a hundred men made it to freedom, the Great Escape remains one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. And it remains that famous to this day.


The memorial to the fifty Allied airmen who were murdered by the Germans in the days and weeks after the Great Escape. It is located a couple of miles away from the site of the camp, near the Polish town of Sagan (spelt ‘Zagan’ today)

To the Fifty

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A Concise History of the British Secret Service

 

Bond. James Bond. MI-6 agent 007 with a license to kill.

Since the mid 1950s, the suave, sophistocated and sexy secret agent known as James Bond, created by the famous author Ian Fleming, has introduced us bit by bit to the world of the British Secret Intelligence Service…the SIS…more commonly known as MI-6, or Military Intelligence – Section 6.

But why is it MI-6? Why not 9? Or 3? Or 2? Or 45? What does “MI-6” actually mean and where does it come from?

This article will delve into the murky and fascinating depths and history (as far as can be discovered) of the British Military Intellgence Service, of which MI-6 is just a tiny part.

The History of Military Intelligence

Those letters and that number are magical, aren’t they? “MI-6”. Bam! We enter a world of nightclubs, cocktails, black-tie evening-dress, guns, car-chases, espionage, amazing fight-scenes and raunchy one-night stands. But MI-6 is just one small section of what was once a much larger military intelligence network. So what was it and where did it come from?

British Military Intelligence as we know it today was born in the early years of the 20th century. In 1909, the War Office in Great Britain authorised the creation of the “Secret Service Bureau”. The Secret Service Bureau was made up of a series of military intelligence departments. Over the decades, they increased and decreased in size and function. At their height, though, the military intelligence departments numbered nineteen in total. They were…

MI-1 – Codes and Cyphers. General codebreaking.
MI-2 – Geographic information on other countries.
MI-3 – Further geographic information.
MI-4 – Aerial Reconnaisance.
MI-5 – Security Service, responsible for internal national security (still operational today).
MI-6 – Secret Intelligence Service, responsible for espionage, etc (still operational today. James Bond is an MI-6 agent).
MI-7 – Propaganda.
MI-8 – Communications security and signal-interception. MI-8 was responsible for scanning airwaves for enemy radio-activity.
MI-9 – POWs, enemy & allied. POW debriefing, aid to allied POWs, interrogation of enemy POWs (until 1941).
MI-10 – Technical analysis.
MI-11 – Military Security.
MI-12 – Military Censorship.
MI-13 – Section unused.
MI-14 – Surviellence of Germany.
MI-15 – Aerial defence intelligence.
MI-16 – Scientific Intelligence.
MI-17 – Secretariat for Director of Military Intelligence.
MI-18 – Section unused.
MI-19 – Enemy POW interrogation (from 1941 onwards, taking over some of the duties from MI-9).

The Secret Service Bureau was in active duty from the early 1900s through both World Wars and onto the Cold War. Many departments were created as a direct result of the two World Wars, while others were created in response to the Cold War starting in the late 1940s, running to the 1980s. Over the years, departments changed functions or ceased functioning entirely, although some lasted for a considerable time before that ever occurred.

MI-8 was responsible for radio-surveillence during the Wars, tapping telephone-wires, scanning radio-frequencies for enemy radio-activity and helping to track down enemy agents by intercepting their messages to find out more about enemy activity.

MI-9 might be familiar to anyone who has studied the famous “Great Escape” of March, 1944. MI-9 was responsible for the aid of allied POWs and allied secret agents. MI-9 sent cleverly-disguised pieces of contraband to allied POWs and agents working behind enemy-lines, in an increasingly ingenious number of ways. Phoney aid-organisations and charity-groups were created which sent over “care-parcels” for allied POWs. Inside these parcels, which, on the outside, came from “family” and “friends”, were items such as maps, matches, compasses, knives and other escape-aids, which the allies put to good use.

MI-6 remains the most famous section of the Secret Service Bureau because of its exposure created by author Ian Fleming and his world-famous “James Bond” novels and series of films, which continues to this day. Fleming was ideally suited for writing such gripping and exotic spy-novels. During the Second World War, he had a post working for British Naval Intelligence, and his work as an intelligence officer during the war exposed him to codes and spies and espionage, a perfect background for James Bond…which probably also explains why Bond also holds the rank of “Commander” in the Royal Navy.

In the 1950s, with Great Britain licking its wounds from the Second World War, Fleming’s novels of a suave, dnner-jacketed spy who flew around the world combating evil was exactly what people wanted to read. Something exciting and escapist, so that they too, could escape from their own, dreary, rationed, postwar lives. It was because of Fleming’s novels that MI-6 has remained so famous today.

The End of the Secret Service Bureau

The MI sections began to become defunct in the years during and after the Cold War. With no “hot” war to fight (a ‘hot’ war being one with actual military engagements), many of the MI sections became useless. There were few if any POWs, there was no Germany to fight and there were few, if any, aerial engagements. One by one, the sections were closed down until eventually, only two remained. The two sections that still had a practical use to the British Government outside of an actual military conflict: MI-5 and MI-6, concentrating on internal, national security and on collecting international intelligence respectively.


Thames House, London. MI-5 HQ


Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) HQ, London

Today, MI-6 still captures the public imagination as the ultimate secret intelligence service, this despite the fact that it is little more than a WWII-era relic of a once large and complex intelligence network. A book was published recently as an official history of the Secret Intelligence Service, covering MI-6’s history from 1909-1949. Who knows how many of those things shown to us in those glitzy Bond films were ever real?

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The Great Wall of China: The Original Rabbit-Proof Fence

 

The Great Wall of China is as synonymous with China as the Tower Bridge is with Great Britain, the Statue of Liberty to the United States or the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Australia. The difference between the Great Wall and all those other things, though, is that the Great Wall came first.

Shrouded in mystery, myth, legend and history, what is the Great Wall, why was it built? How long has it been around and what is it made of? Who built it and to what purpose?

A Note on the Title

For the unknowing and curious readers who have puzzled over the title of this posting, I took inspiration for the title from this famous Australian BigPond Broadband Internet advertisement and the title of the film “The Rabbit-Proof Fence”.

The Purpose of the Great Wall

The Great Wall is not just one structure. It is in fact a series of walls that were built along China’s northern borders, starting in the 5th Century BCE and ending in the 1500s. The walls were built in an attempt to prevent invasions from barbarians, nomadic tribes and Mongolian armies from the north. Several provinces and states in northern China had constructed earthwork and wood defences along their borders as protection against each other as well as for protection against neighbouring countries. In the roughly 200 years before the Birth of Christ, Emperor Qin Shi Huang founded the Qin Dynasty, and so began Chinese Imperial rule, a form of rulership that would continue for centuries, well into the 20th century. In 221 BC, Emperor Shi Huang ordered that all individual state borders and defences be destroyed. It was his desire to unify China as one country and for that one country to defend itself. Building on the ideas of his subjects, Emperor Shi Huang ordered the construction of the first Great Wall.

Very little of that original Great Wall still exsists today. Most of it was destroyed by the elements over the centuries, or was incorporated into additions made to the wall by other emperors during subsequent reigns and dynasties. It’s believed that over a million construction-workers died while building these initial segments of the Great Wall.

Over the next few centuries, Mongolian warriors grew more powerful. The Han and Ming Dynasties added considerably to the wall, due to the increase in attempted invasions by Manchurian armies from the north, starting in the early 1600s. From the start to the end of the Ming Dynasty, nearly 5,000 extra miles of wall was built to combat the threats of invasion from the north.

Building the Great Wall

Because the Great Wall is centuries old, it isn’t actually built out of any one material. Sections of the wall have been built using anything and everything from rubble, specially cut stones, wood, bricks and even rammed earth. The earliest incarnations of the Great Wall were built out of rubble, stones and wood. Rammed earth was also used. It wasn’t until much later that bricks entered the construction site.

Rammed earth construction is what a significant portion of the Great Wall was made of. This is unique construction-technique that has been known since ancient times. Combining ordinary soil, gravel, chalk and other natural materials, the earth is rammed to form the structure it will be building. Rammed earth is packed, pummelled and rammed…hence the name…until it has become extremely compact and dense. This construction method meant that the Great Wall was extremely strong and solid, as well as being impervious to fire…an obvious benefit when constructing a defensive barrier. Rammed earth construction was easy to do, but was extremely labour-intensive, and the Great Wall required millions of labourers to aid in its construction.

It was in later times, around the 16th and 17th centuries, that the Great Wall started taking on the shape that we know it for today, built out of bricks and with wide walkways and watchtowers along its length. Bricks were easier to produce and faster to shape than stones. This readily-available building material meant that the wall could be built faster and stronger.

Of course, for the Great Wall to be built of bricks, it had to have mortar to bind and hold the bricks together. Believe it or not, but the ancient Chinese had already devised a mortar for their bricks. And it wasn’t cement, either. Ancient Chinese mortar was made of rice and eggs! Prepared properly, this simple mixture, which could easily be mistaken for the worker’s lunchbreak snacks, is a substance of surprising strength, and it is still used today in the restoration of ancient Chinese buildings.

The Greatness of the Wall

The Great Wall of China would never be called the Great Wall if there was nothing for it to be great about…would there?

So, what is so great about this wall, anyway?

Including trenches, valleys, rivers and the manmade structure itself, the Great Wall is 8,851km long (5,500mi).
It has over 700 beacon-towers and over 7,000 lookout towers.
Although this obvious varies along its length, the Great Wall is an average of about 20-24ft high.
The wall is 15-30ft wide at the base, and correspondingly, 9-12ft wide at the top. Wide enough for columns of troops, or wagons, to drive along the wall.

The Wall’s name in Chinese is the Wan Li Chang Cheng. “Changcheng” translates into English as “Long fortress” or “Long Wall”. “Wan” is the number ‘10,000’. The word “Li” was a traditional Chinese unit of measurement. In modern measurements, 1Li is 500 meters.

It has long been rumored that the Great Wall is so great that it is actually visible from the moon. This is not true. The colour of the wall’s bricks blends in too easily with the colour of the surrounding earth, making the Wall impossible to see from space, and more than impossible to see from the moon! Testimony from famous astronauts such as Neil Armstrong confirmed the fact that the Great Wall is not actually visible from space at all.

The Great Wall of China ceased being a defensive structure after the 18th century. The Qing or Manchu Dynasty (the last dynasty of Imperial China) was made up of a group of invading Manchus from the north. Their presence in China made the wall’s purpose (keeping out invaders) obsolete and no further additions were made to the wall after this point. The Great Wall was recognised as a significant historical and cultural icon in the second half of the 20th century, and the UNESCO World Heritage Committee made it a World Heritage Site in 1987. Although the ‘touristy’ areas of the Great Wall are renovated, repaired and restored, both for tourist, historic and safety reasons, many sections of the Great Wall, far away from the big cities of northern China, are in disrepair due to natural elements as well as various other factors, such as the wall’s bricks being removed by local villagers for use in construction of homes and roads. Nevertheless, the Great Wall of China remains one of the most famous structures in the world.

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The Story of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Roebling Family Production

 

The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the most famous landmarks in the Five Boroughs of New York City. For over a hundred years, it has been the main crossing-point of the East River for New Yorkers and Brooklynites, heading to each other’s part of town for work and play. Yet, in the scope of history, the Brooklyn bridge hasn’t been around that long at all. When its construction was finished in 1883, it was the biggest suspension-bridge in the United States, but the story behind its construction is one that is even more amazing that the structure that resulted from it. It took fourteen years, hundreds of men, cost one man his life, another man his mobility and thrust an unprepared housewife into the harrowing man’s world of engineering, construction and design, a world which she knew nothing about. This is the story of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Before the Bridge

New York City in the 1860s was a powerhouse. Being at the gateway to the United States from the Atlantic Ocean, it received thousands of immigrants who travelled to the New World from the old one, seeking work, freedom, wealth and prosperity. As a result, New York City’s population skyrocketed. From 49,000 in 1790 to 1,478,100 people in 1870. Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island were overflowing with people, and more people were coming every year. The end of the Civil War and the freedom of the slaves meant that there was a massive migration to the North which swelled New York City’s ranks. A full 300,000 people flooded into the Five Boroughs between 1860-1870 and New York was struggling to cope. There were few bridges crossing the Hudson and East Rivers, and people travelling between Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan relied largely on river-ferries.


A map of Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, dated 1860. The lack of bridges meant that commuters had to take long, slow boat-rides across the East River to reach their destinations

River-ferries were slow and inefficient, hardly suitable for an emerging economic powerhouse such as New York. What was needed was a bridge. A real bridge. Something that would stand the test of time and that would allow New Yorkers to travel to and from Manhattan as they pleased without hindrance from water. What they needed was a man named John Augustus Roebling.

The Roebling Family

The Roebling Family came from Germany. J.A. Roebling’s original name was Johann August Robling and he was born in Germany in July of 1806. By the 1860s, Roebling had moved to America and had established himself as a wealthy and prominent civil engineer. It was his ambition to build a bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan and spare Manhattanites and Brooklynites the daily commute by ferry between the two boroughs. By the late 1860s, Roebling was a civil engineer of considerable experience, having already built several successful suspension-bridges. It was after the American Civil War that he decided that New York City required a proper crossing of the East River. Such an important American city could not possibly survive on slow, inefficient and river-choking ferries to transport its citizens back and forth from home to work every day. They needed a bridge so that they could walk, ride and drive across the river between home and work and save time on their daily communte and be more productive members of society.

Sadly, John Roebling never saw the finished product of the dream that he had. In 1869, while walking along the riverbank of the East River, he became the victim of a horrific ferry-accident. He was scouting for possible locations where the bridge’s two towers would be built when a passenger-ferry crashed into the ferry-landing where he was standing, crushing one of his feet and leaving him paralysed. His toes were amputated from his foot but Roebling refused to have his injury treated further, believing in water-therapy to cure him instead. Water-therapy involved a continual drip of cold, clean water onto the wound; this was supposed to keep the area clean and uninfected. Unfortunately it didn’t work and Roebling died on the 22nd of July, 1869, aged just 63.

After his death, John Roebling’s son, Washington Roebling (born 1837, died 1926) became the chief engineer in charge of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Washington was thirty-two when his father died, but had already seen much of life. He had been a soldier in the United States Army (the Union) during the Civil War and had seen much action, especially during the Battle of Gettysburg. Washington had originally been Assistant-Engineer, with his father being Chief Engineer, but after John’s death, Washington found out that he had been promoted!

Construction of the Bridge

Even back in 1869, construction was never going to be a cheap task. $1,500,000 (one and a half million dollars) had been set aside as construction-costs for the Brooklyn Bridge and six hundred workers were recruited to help build this monumental structure. It would take fourteen years and twenty-seven men would die in the process.

Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge started on the Second of January of 1870 on the Brooklyn side of the East River, with the construction of the Brooklyn-side bridge-tower. As this was going to be a suspension-bridge, the two towers that would hold the cables that would hold up the bridge’s roadway were going to be the most crucial parts of the bridge’s construction. They had to be phenomenally tall and incredibly strong and stable. To do this, the towers would have to be sunk right down through the riverbed, down to the bedrock that lay below. The towers weighed a staggering 120,000,000lbs each, or 60,000 tons apiece!

To achieve this, Washington Roebling ordered the construction of caissons. A caisson is a sealed, watertight, airtight chamber. This chamber, made of wood, would be dumped into the East River, over the proposed site of the tower. It would be sunk down to the riverbed and then all the water inside the caisson would be pumped out. Men could enter the caisson and work in the massive air-bubble that was left behind, digging out the foundations. As the foundations were dug, the caisson would sink deeper and deeper, until they reached bedrock.

But you try this in your bathtub at home. Get a drinking-glass, invert it and force it underwater. Then, let go. The air-pocket trapped inside the upturned glass would force it upwards. It would pop and float up to the top before filling with water and sinking again. If this happened to the caisson, dozens, even hundreds of men, would die, drowned in a matter of seconds as water rushes into the flooding caisson.

To combat this potentially lethal problem, while one set of men dug out the foundations, another set of men would start building the Brooklyn-side tower for the bridge on top of the caisson. As the tower grew progressively higher, its weight would cause it to sink below the waterline and this would keep the caisson in position, preventing it from being forced up to the surface by the air-pressure inside. Once the caisson reached the bedrock and had been embedded sufficiently into it, the caisson would be evacuated and then flooded with cement to seal it and create a solid foundation.

The caissons used for the sinking of the bridge-tower foundations were marvels of engineering in themselves. They contained two shafts for pumping out water, two shafts for men to go into and out of the bottom of the caisson, two supply-shafts to haul away excavated material and send down tools and other excavating-equipment and pipes for air, clean drinking-water and even gas-pipes to provide lighting!


A diagram drawn by Washington Roebling, detailing the interiors of the caissons

Working Underwater

Working under water is scary for anyone. But try working under water in a dark, damp, wooden chamber, buried over fifty feet down under water, mud and sand. This was the reality faced by the hundreds of excavation-workers who dug out the foundations for the Brooklyn-side tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. Progress was frustratingly slow. Six inches a WEEK was considered top speed. And to achieve that six-inches-a-week rate, apart from excavating enough debris from below, workers on top of the caisson had to mortar and lay three courses (levels) of stone to provide sufficient weight to force the caisson down far enough into that six inches. Not enough weight and a serious blowout could occur. In fact, a blowout did occur in autumn of 1870. Soil, rocks and sand were ejected out of the caisson and were blasted five hundred feet into the sky!

Apart from the threats posed by water down in the caissons, there was also the threat of fire. Even though the caisson was literally surrounded on all sides by water, the hot, sweaty, dim atmosphere inside the caisson was just ripe for fire. In December of 1870, a fire was discovered burning inside the Brooklyn caisson. Men with fire-hoses and water-pumps struggled to put it out. If the structural integrity of the caisson was compromised, water could come gushing in. Or even worse, the caisson could weaken, causing the Brooklyn bridge-tower to come crashing down through the caisson-roof, into the river, killing the men instantly, crushing them under tons of bricks, stone, cement and mortar!

The other major danger of working underwater and so far underground is one that is familiar to many divers. In the day of the Roeblings, this was an unknown illness, a mysterious medical condition that seemed to come from nowhere, but which played havoc with the workmen’s health. Today, we call it “Decompression Sickness” or “The Bends”.

In Roebling’s day, it was called “Caisson Disease” or “Caisson Sickness”.

“Caisson’s Disease” was caused by the differing air-pressures inside and outside of the caissons and the differing air-pressures that arose due to the great depths that the men had to travel to reach the bottom of the caissons. In March of 1871, the Brooklyn-side caisson of the bridge had reached bedrock. The caisson was flooded with cement and sealed shut while work continued to complete the rest of the tower. At the same time, construction began on the Manhattan-side tower and caisson.

Like many engineers, Roebling had a very hands-on approach to his work. He spent several hours a day, several days a week, several weeks a year down in the caissons, keeping an eye on day-to-day construction. This constant abuse of his body and prolonged affects of ‘Caisson Sickness’ had disasterous effects. He became paralysed and was bound to a wheelchair as a paraplegic for the rest of his life. Unable to work anymore, Washington Roebling could do nothing but sit in his bedroom at his Brooklyn Heights apartment and watch the construction of his family’s masterpiece through a telescope.

Behind Every Great Man is a Great Woman

This is an oft-used phrase, but fewer times has it been more true than in this instance. And not only was there a great woman behind this great man, but a great woman who did great things, not only for her great man, but for the great city where she and her husband lived and worked.

Emily Warren Roebling.

Emily was Washington’s wife. In 1872 when Washington became paralysed due to Caisson Sickness, Emily not only cared for her husband, but also became his “assistant engineer”. She oversaw the daily running of the bridge’s construction, she relayed Washington’s orders to his on-site assistants and made sure that everything ran as smoothly as possible.

And she was only twenty-nine years old.

Washington was not idle in his wheelchair, though. He knew that if his wife was going to help him to complete the bridge that his father had designed and that he was constructing, she was going to have to know as much as he did. By degrees, Washington taught his wife anything and everything that he (and probably any other civil engineer at that time) knew about how to construct a suspension-bridge. Emily drank it all in and became determined to see the bridge completed.

The construction of the towers took years. It wasn’t until 1875 and 1876 that the Brooklyn and Manhattan towers were completed. And even then, the bridge was only a third completed! They still had to do the roadways and all the cables!

The cables are the most important part of any suspension-bridge. They hold up the road-deck that allows traffic to cross what’s underneath the bridge. If the cables fail, then the bridge collapses. Imagine then, this catastrophe: A world-famous bridge made of inferior steel cables which could snap at any second, sending hundreds of people to their deaths within a matter of minutes.

That was the fate of the Brooklyn Bridge, and would be now, and would have been a long time ago, were it not for swift and decisive intervention.

Wanting to cut corners and save money, unscrupulous assistants and business-partners of the Roeblings were attempting to line their pockets with cash by using substandard steel cables to hold up the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Steel was deliberately purchased that was cheap in price and poor in quality. When the deception was discovered, there was uproar. It was 1878 and the “H.M.S Pinafore” by Gilbert and Sullivan was premiering in London. Construction on the Brooklyn Bridge continued as always, until one of the steel cables on the bridge…snapped.

There was an immediate police-investigation. Whoever was supplying substandard cables for the bridge had to be found out and dealt with…harshly. If the bridge was completed with such inferior materials, it was putting peoples’ lives at risk! What if the bridge collapsed during peak rush-hour? Or when there was a ship passing underneath it? The J. Lloyd Haigh Company, manufacturer and supplier of steel cables, was found at fault and other cable-suppliers were soon found to replace it. Construction on the roadways continued smoothly for the next several years. J. L. Haigh himself was convicted for his fraudulent activities concerning the substandard steel cables and was jailed in 1880.

By 1882, with his health still not improving, Washington Roebling was in serious danger of losing his job. It was by a narrow vote, and much campaigning, imploring and speechmaking by his wife, Emily, that Washington was allowed to keep his position as Chief Engineer.

Completion of the Bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883. The official opening day was the 24th of May, at 2:00pm. Barricades were erected, police-officers lined the streets and spanned across the approaches to the bridge to prevent unauthorised access. Shops closed, bells tolled and people from all over came to witness this grand event…including President Chester A. Arthur. The Irish in New York started rioting because the 24th of May was also the birthday of Queen Victoria!

In honour of her efforts in seeing the bridge’s completion through to the end, Mrs. Emily Warren Roebling was to be the first person to cross the new structure. In a carriage, Emily was driven across the bridge and the first crossing of the East River was declared officially open.

This was a big event. The toll for crossing the bridge on the Opening Day was one penny. This was increased to three pennies for every day thereafter. 150,300 people walked across Brooklyn Bridge on its first day, and 1,800 vehicles drove across it! That’s a phenomenal amount, when you consider that the bridge was only opened to traffic at 5:00pm that afternoon!

Brooklyn Bridge Facts

The Brooklyn Bridge is so famous and so easily recognisable that there’s bound to be lots of fact and fiction about it. Here’s some of the factual stuff…

– The Brooklyn Bridge has four main cables, each one is 15.75in thick.
– The steel cables were designed to be six times stronger than necessary to hold the bridge and its traffic. Tests done by Roebling himself determined that the substandard steel already in use before the scandal was discovered, was five times stronger than necessary. This was considered sufficient, but Roebling still insisted on changing steel-suppliers.
– 27 workers died in the bridge’s construction.
– The Brooklyn Bridge broke the world record for being the first bridge to have steel cables (all the others had cables of iron).
– It was once rumored that the bridge was going to collapse. This caused a stampede that killed a dozen people. Circus ringmaster P.T. Barnum sent twenty-one of his circus-elephants across the bridge to prove its strength to the public.