23/09/2011 by Scheong

A Forgotten Country: Germany Between the Wars

Germany is a terrible country.

Or at least, that’s the impression you get after reading about Germany in school. The Berlin Wall, Nazism, the Franco-Prussian War, the Great War, the Second Great War, concentration-camps, antisemitism and horrible, horrible, horrible food.

And that might all be true. Germany has not had the greatest of pasts. Why it was only about twenty years ago that Germany became a proper country again. Forever and always, it’s a country that’s been overshadowed by the two greatest conflicts in history, bullied by every other country on earth for starting wars that nobody wanted. A history teacher of mine once said that the Second World War was nothing more than Act II of a big and continuous conflict that had never really finished after the end of the First World War in 1918. And this is probably a view held by quite a few people, that Germany, sore and licking its wounds after being defeated in World War One, planned for twenty years to come back and kick butt again and…lose again…even more spectacularly.

Amazingly…this isn’t true.

Germany between the Wars was a struggling country that for about fifteen years, enjoyed a brief, oh-so-brief existence as a country with culture, music and entertainment and unity that wouldn’t be felt again until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, fifty years after the start of the Second World War.

Germany after the First World War

Germany at the close of the First World War was a bloody mess. The humiliating Treaty of Versailles ruffled a lot of German feathers. Germany’s army and navy were forcibly downsized and Germany was not allowed to have an airforce. There were significant territorial changes as well. France, Denmark and Poland all took slices out of Germany and German shipping-companies were forced to sell all their new (or soon-to-be-completed) ocean-liners to the Allies as forms of war-reparations. One of the most famous of these ships was the R.M.S. Berengaria. Originally named the S.S. Imperator, the ship was sold to the British after the end of the First World War as part of Germany’s war-reparations. The Berengaria spent only a year and a month sailing for the German Hamburg-America shipping-line. It was used briefly by the U.S. Navy before being sent to the famous British shipping company, the Cunard Line in 1919 where it served for twenty years until 1939.

The S.S. Imperator/R.M.S. Berengaria

The First World War changed a lot of things in Europe. National boundaries were redrawn, maps were reprinted and monarchies and empires that had lasted for centuries, collapsed in less than a decade. The Russian Empire, ruled over by the fantastically wealthy Romanov Dynasty, vanished into history in 1917. In Germany, the king, Wilhelm the Second, abdicated at the end of the war and Germany was to become a republican democracy. And a republican democracy it would forever remain. Or at least, that was the plan.

Kaiser Wilhelm II. Notice that his right hand is clasped over his left. He posed like this deliberately so that nobody would see his deformed left hand

The Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic was the Germany that never was. Like a line out of a certain Marlon Brando film, Germany could’ve been something. It could’ve been a contender, instead of a bum, which is what it became.

The Weimar Republic was the government that replaced the German Empire in 1918. It gets its name from the city of…Weimar, where this new form of governance was conceived. It was in Weimar that a new constitution was written up and the new government declared operational. It would start an era known as the Second Reich. In English, the German word ‘Reich’ roughly translates as ‘Realm’ or ‘State’. The first unified German state or ‘Reich’ (from 1871-1918) was the German Empire.

The Second Reich, the Weimar Republic, wanted to create a new, modern, glorious Germany. A country that would be strong, respected, cultured, diverse and learned. And for fourteen years, fourteen oh-so-short years, the German people and the people of the world, got a glimpse into what might have been.

1922: The German Hyperinflation Crisis

The Weimar Republic was shaken constantly by all kinds of economic and political earthquakes. It would take years to pay off Germany’s war-reparations to the victors of the Great War. The reparations cost money. And the Germans needed more money. So they started printing more German Marks. And so they did. But then the value of the Mark dropped, because money is only worth something if it’s relatively scarce. So because the value of the Mark dropped, it wasn’t worth as much. Which meant that the German government had to print even more money to compensate for the drop in value. Which caused even less scarcity, which caused a further drop in value, which necessitated more printing of more money for less value which required more printing of more money for…You get the picture.

You don’t have to read German to know that’s a lot of worthless money. Pictured here are German Mark banknotes that read “50 Million” and “20 Million” Marks. They date from 1923

By 1922, Germany was royally screwed. The crippling war-debts that it had to pay were wreaking havoc with the German currency system. In a matter of months, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, billions, trillions of Marks…became absolutely worthless. It was a disaster. People who had saved thousands of Marks to put their kids through school, or buy a car, or buy a house, or that new suit, or the new radio that they wanted…suddenly went to the bank to be told that their life-savings…were now worthless. Prices on ordinary, everyday items skyrocketed and housewives would go shopping with baby-perambulators. Not to hold the baby, but to hold the billions of Marks they needed just to buy a dozen eggs. Husbands carried home their paychecks from the banks in their wives’ washing-baskets and children played with stacks of thousands of Mark-banknotes as if they were building-blocks. At home, people literally had money to burn, and they fed their fireplaces and stoves with worthless banknotes to start cooking dinner. The German Mark was quite literally, not worth the paper it was printed on. By the November of 1923, the German Mark was in such dire straits that people were being issued with banknotes that had ‘values’ printed on them up in the billions of marks range.

The situation in Germany grew desperate. Businesses and shops were closing down and food-riots were becoming common. Businesses couldn’t do business and shopkeepers wouldn’t sell their wares to people who paid with money that wasn’t worth anything. Farmers refused to import their produce into towns to be paid in paper banknotes that were not worth anything. Ordinary, hardworking Germans were laid-off as their companies became unable to pay their skyrocketing wages and salaries and people started losing their jobs.

Like I said above, by November of 1923, the hyperinflation crisis was completely out of control. The old German Mark was completely worthless and the economy was in a shambles. To rescue the country, the banks found a simple solution to their problems. Instead of printing mindblowingly high denominations of the same currency all the time…why not print a new currency?

This currency reform resulted in the creation of the Rentenmark, named after the Renten Bank which created and issued this new German currency. Over the next few weeks, the currency finally stablised and things gradually returned to normal.

The Start of the Nazis

But what else was happening in Germany?

Well, in 1922, a small, insignificant political party was formed. The Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei The NSDAP. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Big mouthful, huh?

Let’s call them something simpler. Let’s call them…

The Nazis.

Contrary to what you might think, the Nazis were not established by Adolf Hitler. He merely took hold of them once they were established. A man named Anton Drexler founded the Nazis in 1922. In 1923, the Nazis staged the famous Beer Hall Putsch, also called the Munich Putsch. ‘Putsch’ is a German word that basically means ‘Uprising’ or ‘Revolution’. It was meant to try and give the Nazis some standing and recognition in the political community. What it got them was legal trouble. Thanks to the putsch, Hitler got chucked in jail…where he wrote the book “Mein Kampf”, ‘My Struggle’.

With the Nazis temporarily out of the way, Germany enjoyed a wonderful decade in the sun.

The German Renaissance

From 1923-1933, Germany enjoyed a cultural high-time that would not be seen again until after the end of the Second World War. For ten short, wonderful years, everything was coming up roses. Germany became famous for its cafe culture, it’s jazz-clubs, it’s cabaret-shows, it’s saucy, naughty sex-shows, nightclubs, jazz-bands, popular music, crooners, a-capella harmony-groups, such as the appropriately named “Comedian Harmonists” and a rising film-industry. The 1927 German film “Metropolis” was one of the most famous films to come out of Germany in this time.

From 1919 until 1933, a design and architectual movement known as ‘Bauhaus’ swept across Germany. Bauhaus designs were sleek, angular and modern. Nothing like the ornate, highly-decorated, intricately crafted buildings of pre-war Germany. It was like the German answer to American and British Art Deco of the 1920s.

For at least ten of fourteen years, Germany was riding high. It had everything. Jazz. Sex. Drugs. Transvestites. A thriving music industry, film industry, automotive industry and fascinating architecture. But it was not to last.

The Great Depression

Like almost every other country in the world, Germany was knocked hard by the Great Depression. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 did little to shake things up, but by the start of the 1930s, things were looking bleak. By 1932 and 1933, the Depression had reached the lowest point that it ever would, and Germany was in desperate trouble. People were out of work again for the second time in less than ten years, and the German government had no idea what to do. The sensible thing of course, was to get people working again. To give them jobs. Any jobs. And if there aren’t jobs…create jobs by planning ambitious public-works projects, like what the American government was doing, with construction-projects like the Hoover Dam. If nothing else, big jobs like this would get people working, get people earning money, get people spending, and get the economy back on track.

But there’s a problem. Big public-works projects require big money. Not easy to get when the country’s bust. So how do they get more money? They have to print more money. But the last time they printed more money, they had hyperinflation that destroyed the economy. The Germans were desperate for a way out. They had no idea what to do.

The Reichstag Fire

The Reichstag is the enormous and grand Victorian-era building that houses the German Parliament. Here’s a photo of it:

On the 27th of February, 1933, the Reichstag was the target of a vicious arson-attack by an out-of-work bricklayer. The fire was so severe that a considerable portion of the building was gutted and the interior badly damaged. Public confidence in the government was shaken and people were nervous and scared. It was at this time that a man named Adolf Hitler approached the German president, Paul Von Hindenberg, who unwittingly signed into law, various emergency measures. Taking advantage of the public nervousness following the Reichstag fire, the Nazi Party with Hitler at its head, swept into power before year’s end, starting the Third Reich, and twelve years of increasing terror and oppression on a country that had come so far in so short a time, and with so much to lose…

The Effect of Nazism

“Why”, you might ask, did Nazism have such a negative effect on Germany? And why did the Germans vote for Nazism if they knew what a horrible thing it was?

Well, the fact was, that they didn’t know what a horrible thing it was. Don’t forget that in the early 1930s, Germany was so desperate for a way out of the Depression that they were willing to try anything. Including putting their faith in a scrawny guy with a toothbrush moustache and a half-jar of Brylcreem in his hair. While initially, the Nazi presence in Germany was welcomed, its racial policies soon destroyed everything that Germany had struggled for years to make for itself. The music, the jazz, the beautiful buildings, the nightclubs, the moving-pictures, the actors, the authors, writers, painters, composers and architects all vanished. And with it, Germany had lost irreplacable culture. Why did they all vanish?

Because they were all Jews.

The majority of German intellectuals (doctors, lawyers, scientists, professors, teachers, writers and architects) and artists (such as writers, filmmakers, musicians, singers, songwriters, painters and composers) were all Jewish, or were Jewish-sympathisers. The Nazi Party’s strong antisemitic policies meant that thousands of Jews fled Germany for England, America and China during the second half of the 1930s, taking all of the best of German culture with them. Just how strong was Nazi antisemitism?

I’m going to introduce you to a song. It goes by many names. In English, its translated title is “To Me, You’re Beautiful”. Isn’t that a wonderful title? It’s more commonly known by its German title: “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen”. And it was a smash-hit around the world during the early 1930s, especially in Germany. It was extremely popular and dozens of artists recorded it. Want some names? Benny Goodman. The Andrews Sisters. Ella Fitzgerald. Guy Lombardo. Even legendary 1930s crooner Al Bowlly covered it. It was an extremely popular tune.

“Bei Mir Bistu Shein”, the original Yiddish sheet-music cover

But why am I mentioning this song?

Because it was extremely popular in Weimar Germany. In fact, it was extremely popular all over the world. And it was extremely popular with the Nazis.

…Until they discovered that the song’s title is actually “Bei Mir Bistu Shein“. Why is this a problem? Because that’s not German. It’s not English.

It’s Yiddish. One of the chief languages spoken by…Jews. You guessed it. This beautiful piece of music was written and composed by Jews.

The moment the Nazis found this out, the song was immediately outlawed and banned throughout all of Germany. Just one extreme example of the conviction of Nazi antisemitism and the shocking toll it took on the German Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s.

Continuing in this vein, the musical group I mentioned earlier, the ‘Comedian Harmonists’ had to break up because some of their members were Jews and they were terrified of the Nazis. They fled to America…where they couldn’t find work because being German in the 1940s was kind of dangerous…and the remaining, ‘Aryan’ German members of the group couldn’t continue with their work…because the Nazis had banned jazz! And if that wasn’t bad enough, they’d also forbidden musical groups from giving themselves English-sounding names! ‘Comedian Harmonists’ isn’t the translation of their name from German to English…It was their name and it was their only name. The only one they’d ever had.

Fritz Lang, the director who produced the famous film ‘Metropolis’, fled to America in 1936 because he felt intimidated by the Nazis…He was also a Jew. A lot of actors in Germany fled to America and worked in Hollywood. Bauhaus architecture died under the strict Nazi regime and the once free and easy Germany had lost freedoms that it wouldn’t know again until 1946.

29/07/2011 by Scheong

Suited Up: Stuffy or Stylish?

A while ago, I wrote a piece on the history of the suit. If you don’t remember it, you can find it here. Recently I started thinking about suits again. I started thinking about what they are and how they’re perceived in society. What they mean. What they evoke and how the suit has changed over the course of history. It’s a fascinating, sad, scary and hopeful and unfortunate saga that plays out almost like some sort of Shakespeare thing that you had to study at school. So, where do we begin?

Along with men like Fred Astaire, George Raft and the Duke of Windsor, Cary Grant was always impeccably dressed

The Suit Today

In the 21st Century, the suit is viciously ripped apart and herded into one of two different camps. Those who see it as being super straitlaced, uptight, rigid, formal and uncomfortable and…okay who are we kidding? There’s really only one camp. But the point of this article is to show that there needn’t be this one camp and that indeed, this camp shouldn’t exist in the first place. The original purpose and history of the suit which was, as I said in my other article, a cornerstone of style, has been distorted, changed, warped and muddled up over the past fifty-odd years and today, how the public views the average two or three-piece suit, is very different to how the suit was originally viewed, a hundred, eighty, seventy-five and sixty years ago, when suits were worn on an almost daily basis. In this article we’ll look at what the suit traditionally was, how it changed from this to what it is now, and what, in the mind of this blogger at any rate, the suit should always and should continue to be. Let’s begin with the public perception in the 21st Century, of the typical man’s suit…

Perceptions of the Suit

There are two main perceptions of the suit in the 21st Century. Perception #1: A suit is old-fashioned. It’s formal. It’s for ‘special occasions’. It’s stuffy and constricting and uncomfortable and makes you look like a banker or a lawyer, a businessman or a mobster. You wear it for work and for work only. Then, there’s also Perception #2: A suit is suave and sophistocated, it’s classy. It looks stylish and makes a man feel good, feel interesting, feel important, intelligent, in-control, comfortable, confident…sexy? Maybe that too. So my question is. Why? Why one and why not the other?

If a suit makes you look good. Why don’t more people wear them? And why does the suit have this unfortunate reputation that it does, as outlined in ‘Perception #1’. Is it deserved? Where does it come from? Why do we still have it?

The suit has a reputation of being stuffy and old-fashioned. Overly formal and uncomfortable. You put it on for special occasions and then store it back in your closet until you need it again, like some sort of military dress-uniform that you take out for promotions, parades or special presentations and ceremonies. Like…Weddings. But why should this be so? Where does it come from?

The suit’s current reputation comes from the period after World War Two during the 1960s and 1970s. Suits became synonymous during this period with employment and working and business and jobs. People wore suits all the time and as they say ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’. The suit became associated more and more strongly with work instead of play, with stiffnes and formality instead of relaxation and enjoyment. Because people had to wear them all day at work, it’s likely that they associated them too much with a lack of freedom and therefore, cast them off the moment they weren’t working. But that was never the suit’s job in the first place. It was never designed specifically as a work-uniform, but that’s where it’s been stuck for the last thirty or forty years. Even now in a new century when, with all the mixing and matching we’re doing with clothes, the suit seems to be jammed in some sort of timewarp. Today, when most people think of suits, they imagine TV shows like The Apprentice…

…a sad, but truthful look at the suit in today’s society.

Let’s move away from Perception #1 and move onto Perception #2…

Breaking out of the mould of business and employment, let’s take a look at the social history of the suit and a look at the suit from the other perspective that we have of it: As something classy and sophistocated. You have to understand that the suit wasn’t always seen as some sort of corporate uniform, the way that it might be today. For decades, the suit was seen as a form of, for want of a better and more contemporary term, ‘smart casual’ attire. The suit was the standard set of clothes that a man wore when he was out on the town. When he went out for dinner. When he went to work. When he followed the wife to visit friends or when merely going about his business. A suit used to be a sign of style, good taste, self-respect and confidence and power, sadly replaced it seems, by other qualities that are less indicative of what the suit should respresent: Masculinity and manhood.

So if the suit isn’t formal. Is it casual? If it was worn every day, it must be. But where does it lie on the dresscode scale? Let’s have a look…

At the top we have White Tie. Worn for the most formal of events such as weddings, important state functions and opening night at the theatre. White Tie is rarely worn today by most people except when it’s specifically asked for on an invitation-card.

Below White Tie we have Black Tie. Still fairly common today, Black Tie is worn for semi-formal occasions such as dinners with friends, parties, school or university events and presentations and awards ceremonies (Academy Awards, for example). White Tie is the most formal level of dress in the Western hemisphere. Black Tie, directly below it, is traditionally seen as semiformal dress, worn for more relaxed occasions.

To borrow a term from contemporary English, below Black Tie, we have ‘Smart Casual’. This was the area which up until fairly recently, was the domain of a certain set of clothes: The Suit. The suit was seen as a badge of pride and honour back in the old days. You wore it to show you had style, class and panache. It was the gold standard of men’s attire for well over a century. A man wearing a suit was seen as a snappy dresser who took care and pride in his appearance and who was someone worth taking notice of. Over the decades, suits changed in style, but they never moved from their rung on the wardrobe ladder. Up to the 1940s, a suit almost always had a waistcoat with it, making it a three-piece suit. The reasoning behind this was because it was considered unacceptable to display the white of your shirt. Your shirt was worn under your suit. It was an undergarment like your boxer-shorts or your briefs. Most likely, you only changed your shirt once a week anyway, so there was certainly no expectation that you’d want to show it off. Also, in days before central heating, the waistcoat provided an essential layer of warmth in cold, blustery buildings. Wearing two-piece suits regularly didn’t start becoming popular until after World War Two, when strict cloth-rationing made the manufacture of three-piece suits so much more difficult than it was before the war. Three-piece suits are much harder to find these days than two-pieces, but still, the suit remains.

Pussy Galore and James Bond (Sean Connery) in ‘Goldfinger’, with Bond wearing a three-piece suit

Finally, below the suit, we have street-casual, which is what most people wear today. Slacks. Jeans. Shirts. Pullovers. T-shirts and so forth. Traditionally, clothes such as these were seen as work-clothes. T-shirts, singlets and shirts were seen as underwear that you put on to absorb sweat and perspiration. Jeans were worn when you had heavy labour to do such as gardening, woodchopping, cleaning or any other activity that would’ve been unwise to carry out in a suit.

So as you can see, the suit is far from being some sort of formal, stuffy uniform. And it was never designed to be stuffy, anyway. Suits, when properly tailored and measured, are meant to be perfectly fitting and comfortable. If a suit is uncomfortable for whatever reason, then it’s not the right one for you. But just because a suit looks nice doesn’t mean that it’s automatically formalwear.

Suits: Casual or Formal?

This is the big style and fashion combat ground in the 21st century. Imagine an enormous table with thimbles armed with needles on one side and thread-spools armed with pins on the other with a battle-line of a tailor’s measuring tape running between the two. Where does the suit lie? In formalwear or casualwear? Let’s consider the photograph below for a minute…

Here’s actor Simon Baker wearing a three-piece suit. In no way does this look even remotely formal. Sleeves are up. Jacket’s off, shirt-collar is undone, he’s tieless and his shirtfront is open. This diversity of the suit, to look either elegant or relaxed speaks to me of its lack of formality as opposed to its abundance of it.

So the answer is that the suit does lie in the casualwear camp, and it’s just as well that it should, because that is what it was designed for. That is what it was invented for. That is what it’s meant to be seen as and used as. That’s why the perception of the suit as being a stuffy and formal and rigid uniform is unfounded. Because it simply does not exist. Invitation cards will say “White Tie” or “Black Tie”. Sometimes even “Smart Casual”. They will never say “Wear a suit”. Why? Because a suit isn’t formal. That’s why. And another reason why the suit wavers from formality is because formality is just that. It’s formal. White Tie is White Tie. Black Tie is Black. But a suit isn’t. It changes and alters constantly. Only casual clothes can do that. If you don’t believe me, then look up a fellow named Edward, Duke of Windsor.

Edward, Prince of Wales. Edward VIII of England. Edward the Duke of Windsor.

Edward, Duke of Windsor, with his wife, Wallis, the Duchess of Windsor

Apart from famously abdicating in 1936 to marry an American divorcee (Oh the scandal!), King Edward VIII was famous for one other thing – Rocking the suit. Before big fashion models showed up, the Duke was one of the most photographed men in the world, for his sense of fashion and style. And yet he always wore a suit. But that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t that he wore a suit, but rather what he did with it, changing, mixing, matching, mashing and churning things up. He was a style barometer that told the British people what to wear, how to wear it and if nobody else was wearing it, then he would. I can’t find the source on this, but I remember reading once that the Duke of Windsor was the guy who popularised zip-flies on trousers! Before then, trousers all had button-flies!

If you want more proof that a suit belongs in casualwear, think for a moment about a tuxedo and a suit. A tuxedo MUST be worn as a tuxedo. You can’t chop and change it. A suit is versatile. You can wear it with or without the jacket. You can put the waistcoat on if you’re cold, or you can leave it at home and wear it as a two-piece. You can use the jacket on its own as a sportsjacket or you can use the trousers seperately from the rest of the suit. You can wear the jacket and trousers with a contrasting waistcoat for a more broken up, less solid look and none of this will ever look wrong. It might look different, but never wrong. That’s not something you can say about true formal attire. Again, take a look at the photo of Simon Baker if you need any proof.

When Do You Wear a Suit?

I remember a while back, my father told me: “We should get you a suit. Something that you can wear for graduation”, by which of course, he meant my graduation from my bachelor’s degree at university. Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy! A suit! A suit a suit a suit! I’d never owned a suit before. I was excited and interested and fascinated. I was getting my first suit! I was gonna be a big boy! And then…bam! There it was. My first glimpse into how the suit is seen today. As something special to be dragged out on special occasions, paraded around as something special and unique and then shoved back into a box, like hauling grandpa out of the retirement home for a family reunion to remind people he’s still around before driving him back home at the end of the day.

But why?

Right here, you see the problem. Because suits have been elevated to the level of formalwear (a pedestal it was never supposed to occupy), the suit has been shunted aside to ‘occasional wear’. When’s the right time? When’s the wrong time? There is no right or wrong time to wear a suit. There are times where it might be more or less appropriate to wear one, but as I explained, a suit is casual clothing and therefore, fluid, with no real rules that govern its use. So when do you wear a suit? The answer really is: Whenever you like, so long as it doesn’t get damaged or dirty. After all, that’s what they were invented for. Do you really want to put on a suit only when you have a special occasion? Lying down in a pine box is a special occasion. Is that the only time you want to wear something sharp and snappy? I certainly don’t. So don’t let that be your only time that you’ll be wearing one either. Wear it on nice days. Crappy days. Days when there’s something interesting going on, or on days when there’s nothing on at all. A suit isn’t like a tuxedo that you can only put on after 6:00pm, it’s something you can wear all the time, so embrace it and do it and feel good about it.

Concluding Remarks

Okay. So where am I going with all this? The point of this posting is not to try and get every Tom, Dick, Harry, George and Michael into a suit…that would take far too much fabric anyway…but rather to try and destroy some misconceptions that have sprung up over the last thirty or forty years about the suit. The point of this posting is to clearly demonstrate the position of the suit and to illustrate that its current and unfortunate reputation that it holds, is unfounded, unwarranted and above all, unnecessary. The suit is a fine and elegant set of clothes, but that doesn’t make it formal or stuffy or straitlaced. It doesn’t make it rigid or tight or anything else along those lines. A suit is meant to suggest style, comfort, sophistocation and relaxation. After all, the suit’s full name is a lounge suit. So go ahead and lounge around in it. Be relaxed and casual, as the suit was meant to be. If you have a suit, don’t lock it away in the cedar cupboard up in the attic. Yank it it out, put it on and go out for a wander. We all want to look sharp and elegant. And it’s easy to be so. It just requires the shaking off of dust and a bit of a courage to do it. In today’s world of torn jeans, logo T-shirts and baseball caps, anyone wearing a suit will stand out as a sharp and shining example of manhood, confidence, style and sensibility. Be like the man who was king and rule the suit. Leave the Levis and the Piping Hot at home; suit up and step out.

26/06/2011 by Scheong

Black and White – All about the Tuxedo

I think I should start this off by saying that this isn’t a fashion and style blog and it ain’t a menswear blog. It’s a history blog. I won’t be covering every single itty-bitty-titty-kitty detail about the do’s, the don’ts and the faux-pas of how to and how not to wear a tux. If that’s what you came here for, then you probably won’t find it.

The tuxedo is the ultimate men’s uniform. You see it at fancy parties, awards ceremonies, Christmas balls, royal gatherings, state dinners, weddings and anniversary celebrations. James Bond would never be seen without one. But it seems like these days, nobody really knows what a tuxedo is. They have a vague idea that it’s black and white and it’s mandatory daily attire for penguins…but that’s about it. What is a tuxedo, what makes up a tuxedo, when do you wear one? Why?…And why the hell is it called a ‘tuxedo’ anyway? That’s what this article is about.

All dressed up and no place to go…

The History of the Tuxedo

The tuxedo was born in the late Victorian era. By the 1870s and 1880s, people looking for a night out in snappy clothes were looking for a snappier alternative to having to wear glitzy, glamorous, over-colourful clothes that made them look like clowns. Stuff like frock-coats, cravats, buckled shoes and coloured waistcoats other articles of clothing, simply did not say “classy night on the town”. They wanted something simple, easy and sharp that would always look good. Black and white. Crisp and elegant. Enter the tuxedo.

The tuxedo was born in England in the 19th century. Elements of it had existed ever since Georgian times, but it wasn’t until the second half of the 1800s that the tuxedo really began to emerge in the form that we know it today. To understand how it came about, we need to understand when it was worn.

Victorian high society was all about social connections. Who you were depended on what you did, how you did it, who you did it with and who you knew. Connections and friendships were important. The way to meet people was at big social gatherings, events like garden parties, balls, dinner parties, luncheons, high teas and sporting-events. There was no Twitter, no FaceBook, no MySpace back then. You had to go out and find people to talk to!

Of course, part of being received in upper-class society was knowing what to wear. And you didn’t just wear anything to any occasion. There were amazingly strict wardrobe rules for every single event for every single hour of the day. There was morning dress, daytime dress and evening dress. The tuxedo fell under the umbrella of “Evening Dress”, meaning that you put it on after the sun went down. Typically, this meant changing into your tuxedo after six o’clock in the evening or at sundown (whichever came first). This is also why the black tuxedo jacket is also called a ‘dinner jacket’. The tuxedo was further broken down into “Evening Dress” and “Full Evening Dress”. Here’s where things can get complicated.

Black and White

‘Tuxedo’ is a very loose term. Like I said, people generally have a vague idea of what it is, and that’s all. But it’s rather more complicated than that. Traditional men’s evening dress is divided into two categories. Evening Dress and Full Evening Dress.

‘Evening Dress’ is the classic tuxedo. Also called ‘Black Tie’. A black dinner-jacket, a white dress-shirt with studs and a detatchable collar and french cuffs which had to be held shut with cufflinks and, as the name suggests…a black bowtie. Evening Dress was worn during semiformal social occasions between friends and professional acquaintenaces that took place after sundown, typically dinner, nights at the theatre or when providing private entertainment. Black Tie is what most people are familiar with today as being the classic tuxedo and which tends to end up as the dress-code on most formal social-event invitations.

The pieces of a traditional Black Tie tuxedo included…

Black one or two-button dinner-jacket or ‘Tuxedo’ jacket.
Black Tuxedo trousers.
Black low-cut Tuxedo waistcoat (optional. If you wear this, wear suspenders; ditch the cummerbund)
Black patent-leather shoes.
Black socks.
White dress-shirt with studs and cufflinks.
Black bowtie.
Cummerbund (that goes around the waist) or a pair of black suspenders that go over the shoulder, hidden by the jacket (which is usually kept closed).

Pierce Brosnan as James Bond wearing Black Tie

Less common today is the more formal ‘White Tie’ enssemble, which people tend to confuse. There are very few White Tie events that call for a dress-code like this, so people aren’t always aware of what to wear or what to expect.

German bandleader Max Raabe wearing classic White Tie complete with waistcoat, dress-shirt and studs, white bowtie and detatchable wing-collar

‘White Tie’ is the highest level of formality in male attire. White Tie is the kind of stuff you put on when you’re going to meet the Queen. The components of White Tie traditionally include…

Black tailcoat.
Black tuxedo trousers.
Black patent-leather shoes.
Black socks.
White, collarless dress-shirt, held shut with shirt-studs.
White detatchable wing-collar, held onto the shirt with collar-studs.
White bowtie. As the collar doesn’t fold down to hide the tie, it must be one that the wearer can tie. Not a clip-on.
White, low-cut waistcoat, usually with three or four buttons. For a time, black waistcoats of a similar cut were popular, but white is the most traditional.

In searching YouTube for those hideous “modern fashion-and-style guide” videos, I came across one that said that the only difference between Black and White Tie is that you change the jacket from black to white…WRONG! Black Tie is Black Tie, White Tie is White Tie. They are not interchangable and they are not synonymous. Show up for a White Tie event wearing a Black Tie enssemble and you’ll probably be kicked out.

Traditionally, studs and cufflinks would be white or mother-of-pearl. During funerals or wakes, especially during Victorian times, it was acceptable to wear black studs and links, as they were part of acceptable Victorian mourning-jewellery (jewellery that was jet black, in order to reflect the solemnity of the occasion). A thin and discreet dress-watch is one of the acceptable choices of timepiece for Black or White Tie. The best option is a gold chain and pocketwatch or no watch at all (wearing a watch suggests that you need to keep an eye on the time because you have somewhere else to be. And if you’re busy on the night that you’re attending a Black or White Tie event, then you really shouldn’t be there anyway!)

When to Wear Black or White?

Although both are only ever worn after six o’clock in the evening, as I said above, Black Tie and White Tie are not interchangable and one does not stand in for the other. So when do you wear what?

Black Tie is usually worn for events such as going out to dinner with friends, going to a friend’s house for a party, going to the theatre, attending a dance or a party and attending institutional functions, such as those held by schools or universities. You wear Black Tie when you go out for a classical concert or an evening at Carnegie Hall.

White Tie is worn for only the most exclusive of social functions. State dinners, meeting heads of state, attending the Opening Night of a theatre-production and attending evening weddings. White Tie is for those events where you need to know people in order to get one of those handwritten, security-watermarked invitations to get past the security guys wearing sunglasses and black T-shirts to enter the glitzy ballroom filled with celebrities.

The Tuxedo Through the Times

The modern Black and White Tie enssembles started showing up in the late Victorian-era as an alternative to the more colorful and flashy clothes that were typically worn by men of the period. Black Tie and White Tie were on the rise during the 1880s and through to the 20th century, reaching a peak around the 1920s-1950s, when it was popular to go out nightclubbing or fancy restaurants to see famous jazz-orchestras putting on a show or seeing great West End or Broadway Shows, which boomed during this interwar and immediate postwar era. Starting in the 1930s, the white dinner-jacket began to replace the traditional black or midnight blue one (as seen below) when a more comfortable alternative was needed when wearing Black Tie in a warm or tropical climate. Black absorbs heat so wearing full traditional Black Tie in a place like Florida or Singapore would be far too uncomfortable. White, which doesn’t absorb heat, was the natural and acceptable alternative.

During the 1920s, 30s and 40s, some swing-jazz big-bands would give live performances dressed in Black or White Tie. Occasionally, their version of Black or White Tie would be slightly altered so that party-guests wouldn’t mistake the musicians for other guests or staff working at the performance venue.

In the above photo, you can see Benny Goodman (front, with clarinet) and His Orchestra performing; ca. 1938. Bandmembers are wearing Black Tie, but with a more informal white jacket instead of the more traditional black, possibly to differentiate themselves from the audience. Sometimes, bandmembers would wear Black Tie while the bandleader would wear White Tie in order to make him stand out to the audience, such as in this photograph of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra taken in 1921:

Whiteman may be seen wearing White Tie (second from right, standing next to the pianist) while the other bandmembers wear Black Tie

Where did ‘Tuxedo’ Come From?

They’ve always been called ‘Black Tie’ or ‘White Tie’, differentiated by the colour of the bowtie and the presence or lack of a white waistcoat, but why do we also call them ‘Tuxedos’? Where did this term come from?

To be clear, the ‘Tuxedo’ is not the full getup. Traditionally, the ‘tuxedo’ was the black dinner-jacket. It wasn’t until later that the word ‘Tuxedo’ referred to the jacket and the black trousers as well. The word ‘Tuxedo’ comes from the town of Tuxedo Park in New York State in the United States of America.

Black Tie and White Tie Today

White Tie isn’t as common today as it used to be, unless you’re a filthy rich billionaire going to a charity fundraising dinner-party or something, at least. Black Tie still remains fairly common though, although it seems that there will always be a number of people who don’t know what it is or how to wear it…President Barack Obama for one…

…If you haven’t figured out what’s wrong here, Obama’s missing the wing-collar which goes under the bowtie and he’s missing the white waistcoat as well. Obama is supposedly famous for his high-fashion faux-pas…

Looking for more information? Then check out the Black Tie Guide, the definitive internet authority on Black and White Tie, what it is, how to wear it, where it came from and what makes it up.

20/06/2011 by Scheong

Plumbing the Depths: Joseph Bazalgette and the Great Stink of London

Have you ever wondered what happens when you press the ‘Flush’ button on your toilet and wondered where all the contents of your toilet-bowl vanish off to? Everyone’s wondered that at one point or another in their lives. Have you ever pondered what happened to mum’s wedding-ring after it got washed down the sink and didn’t show up in the U-bend at the bottom of the pipe? Back in Victorian London, people didn’t have to wonder about things like this. They knew where their sewerage went…and that’s exactly what this article is about.

Admittedly, writing an article about a 160-year-old sewer-system is not the biggest thing on the list of subjects to write about for any writer, but the story London’s Victorian sewer-system is about a lot more than huge pipes in the ground that haul away rainwater, bodily waste and general sewerage…It’s about an ambitious and dangerous civil engineering project, it’s about the vastly changing opinions on the causes of disease, it’s about ambition and determination and, as is more often the case than is not, it’s about how the hands of the mighty are only swayed by mighty events. This is the story of Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the sewers of London.

London, 1850

The Industrial Revolution was not called such for no reason at all. It revolutionised alright. It revolutionised bigtime. It revolutionised everything in the world. And unfortunately, it also revolutionised London. The city’s population skyrocketed during the Victorian era, with more and more people surging into the British capital looking for money, work and a better livelihood for themselves and their families. Slums sprang up, houses were built, new businesses were opened and all over town, people were settling into their new lives.

But as the city of London grew above ground, below the streets and buildings of the great metropolis, there was a horrible, unimaginable and unseen disaster waiting to explode.

For centuries, London had existed without sewers. What few public sewers and drains that there were existed as old trenches or tunnels which were covered over as the city grew, or were pipes, channels or streams that ejected their contents directly into the River Thames. The majority of households still relied on daily visits by the nightsoil-carrier or gong-scourer, who would come by each evening to empty their chamberpots and cesspits. What drains that did exist were by the 1850s, centuries old. They were frequently blocked by sewerage or overwhelmed by the frequent heavy rainfalls for which London is globally famous. Streets flooded, sewers backed up and overflowed and disease and stench were rife throughout London. By 1850, there had already been one outbreak of cholera in which over 14,000 Londoners died from drinking the incredibly contaminated water, which had been polluted by the overflow of sewerage within the confines of London. A solution to this increasingly unavoidable problem was needed…and it was needed yesterday!

In charge of the sanitation of London was a body of men called the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers based in Soho Square. Try as they might, they were unable to find a single reasonable method of removing sewerage from London. This all changed in 1849. In August of that year, a new assistant engineer was appointed to the Commission, a thirty-year-old engineer named Joseph Bazalgette.

Bazalgette didn’t have any idea of how to combat the growing problem of London’s sewerage either, but when he saw the products of those people who thought they did, he began to realise that something serious had to be done. Unable to find a way to remove sewerage from London, the Commission printed a letter in the Times newspaper, asking its readers to post suggestions to them on how to clean up London. It was up to young Bazalgette to sift through every single one of the 137 replies…none of which he deemed suitable for replacing the narrow, clogged and overflowing channels that served as ‘sewers’ up to that point in London’s history.

In 1855, the Commission of Sewers was replaced by a new body, the Metropolitan Board of Works. Another cholera epidemic (in 1853) had proved how ineffectual the Commission had been in finding a solution. The MBW as it was sometimes called, apart from being a new organisation, also had a new leader: Joseph Bazalgette.

Planning the Sewers

Now that he was in charge of his own organisation, Bazalgette set to work. He carried out surveys and measurements, he examined the tidal flow of the River Thames, he carried out explorations of the old sewers and checked their general condition and he drew up bold plans for a vast network of tunnels underneath London which would draw the sewerage away from the capital to pumping-stations where it could be pumped out into the Thames each day at the changing of the tides. The poweful river-currents would drag the sewerage right out to sea and London and the River would be clean and healthy forevermore.

Or at least, that was the plan. The reality was very different.

The government was not pleased. They complained endlessly that Bazalgette’s plans were…too dangerous…too big…would take too long to build…were far too expensive…involved tunnels that were not long enough as to draw the sewerage a satisfactory distance from London…and which the government, as a result, would not give him permission to build. The Metropolitan Board of Works…ground to a halt. For three years, all that Bazalgette could do was redraw his plans…over…and over…and over…and over…and over again. And every single time, the government said ‘No’. All the while, the threat of another catastrophic cholera outbreak was lingering just below the surface.

Cholera and Snow

While Bazalgette struggled with the government and its refusal of his bold new plans for London’s sanitation, nearby, physician Dr. John Snow was battling with the London medical establishment, a battle he would eventually win…posthumously.

Dr. Snow was a researcher and a theorist. As a physician, he was fascinated by the spread of disease and in the 1850s, the disease to study was cholera. Leading medical minds of the time were convinced that cholera was spread via “Miasma” (‘My-as-ma’), a term that literally means ‘Bad Air’. The Miasma theory came up in the early Georgian period to replace the previously widely-held theory of the Four Humours, a medical theory that dated back thousands of years to the ancient Greeks…and which had absolutely no scientific basis at all. The Miasma Theory purported that strong stenches, odours and smells spread disease through the air and that such foul contaminants came from places such as graveyards, rubbish-tips, chimneys, polluted waterways and the bad breath of ordinary people. It was the first, semi-scientific link between the containment of disease and the vital necessity for cleanliness. However, in mid-Victorian times, in an age where the Germ Theory that we know today, would not arrive for several more decades, everyone believed that all diseases were airborne miasmas and that the best way to handle such miasmas was to keep things clean and the air fresh.

This did not, unfortunately, extend to the vital necessity of keeping waterways clean. The idea that disease could be waterborne as well as airborne, simply hadn’t entered the minds of the medical community. But it had entered the mind of Dr. Snow. Through careful plotting, study, observation and record-keeping, he determined that water consumed from a particular pump in Broad Street, East London, caused an unnaturally high rate of cholera cases. By studying which people on Broad Street drank what, when and where, he was able to trace their illnesses back to contaminated water and therefore prove that cholera was a waterborne disease…something that many other medical minds of the day, cast off as ludicrous.

Building the Sewers

Ever since the late 1840s, London had been struggling with the monumental task of trying to find a way to remove vast amounts of sewerage from its streets and arterial river, the Thames. Theories, proposals, ideas and even plans had been put forward as possible solutions, but none of them were even so much as entertained by the government, all cast off as being…too expensive…too dangerous…too impossible…too outrageous. And so for ten years, nothing was done.

That all changed in 1858. By this time, London had become so incredibly polluted that the air had become almost unbreathable. In the summer of that year came the famous ‘Great Stink’. Extreme summer temperatures caused the water in the River Thames to heat up by several degrees and this caused the sewerage contained within it, to give off powerful odours and smells, which wafted all over London. So bad was the smell that Parliament had to relocate outside of London to get away from the unimaginable, nose-wrinkling, eye-watering stench! How could such a great, powerful, technologically advanced city at the heart of a great empire smell like something that had crawled under a bed and died? Finally forced to face the inconvenient truth that London required a serious and long-term solution to its sanitation problems, the government contacted Joseph Bazalgette, the head engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works and asked him how quickly he could start digging.

This cartoon from 1858 shows Father Thames (right) introducing his children (Diptheria, Scrofula and Cholera) to the fair city of London (left). This shows just how bad the pollution of the Thames had become by the time of the Great Stink

The project was never going to be easy. And it was never going to be cheap. London had existed for centuries and had grown for centuries, without any modern sewerage system of any kind at all…and now in a matter of years, they were going to try and undo the lack of foresight that had lasted ever since London had been established back in Roman times! Bazalgette was given three million pounds sterling (unadjusted for inflation) and told to start at once.

Finally given the green light, Bazalgette immediately began surveying the land, measuring distances and determining exactly where each and every tunnel, channel and watercourse would go. How big it would have to be, how high, how long and most importantly…what angle of gradient the tunnels would need to have. There was no space for large, steam-powered pumping-appratus in the middle of London, so every last cubic inch of the sewers had to be angled downwards, towards the East, where the force of gravity would draw the sewerage out of London and down the Thames Valley.

Where possible, the sewers were constructed just a few feet below street-level using the ‘Cut-and-Cover’ method which was also being used for some of London’s Underground subway-tunnels. It was simple…Dig a trench, build the tunnel and then put the earth back on top. In total, there were to be five huge main tunnels, three going underneath London north of the Thames and two going under the areas of London south of the Thames. These great sewers were to intercept smaller sewers that ran north-south (towards the river’s edge) and then take the sewerage far out of London to enormous holding-tanks. Here, vast, steam-powered pumps would pump the sewerage into the river each day at the changing of the tides. As the Thames is a tidal river, all that the people at the pumping-stations had to do was to wait for the tide was at its highest and then, when it began to change, discharge the sewerage. The strong currents would pull it right out to sea.

Although Bazalgette was as careful as possible with his tunnel-construction, insisting on all safety precautions, quality-control checks on the cement and the millions of bricks that would be used to construct the tunnels, a few men did die in their construction; mostly from cave-ins or other work-accidents.

Completing the Sewers

The main components of the sewers were completed in 1865. On the 4th of April, the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) turned on the pumps at the Crossness pumping-station outside of London and for the first time in centuries, London’s water supply began to clean up its act. Cholera disappeared from London as pollution of London’s water-supply began to disappear. It was for this action of constructing London’s sewers, and of many other engineering successes of his throughout London, that in 1875, Joseph Bazalgette was knighted by Queen Victoria and became Sir Joseph Bazalgette.

The Sewers Today

London has grown enormously since Bazalgette’s time. Today, his original, Victorian-era sewer-system makes up only a small portion of the additions that have been made in the over 100 years since he died in 1891. But even without modern additions, Bazalgette was a man of foresight. He had made the sewerage-tunnels as big as possible so that they were able to take twice the amount of even the highest level of rainfall and sewerage that London could produce at the time, meaning that it wouldn’t be necessary for decades to expand and improve his original system until well into the 20th century.

18/06/2011 by Scheong

“It is a habit of mine to have an exact knowledge of London” – London According to Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is famous the world-over. From Melbourne to Maine, from Singapore to Shanghai, New York to New Orleans, Paris to St. Petersburg. Everyone knows who he is and what he does, what he looks like and where he lives. Billions of people have read his exploits and wondered and mused about the places that he’s been to and to which they themselves might never go. Many famous London landmarks are mentioned in the hefty Holmesian canon (hefty? 1,408 pages in the ‘Complete Sherlock Holmes‘ published by Wordsworth), but rarely are illustrations of these great institutions ever included in any print-run of any combination of the stories contained within the Canon. So where are these places, what are they and what do they look like?

London According to Holmes…

“You know that I cannot possibly leave London!…Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes”
– Sherlock Holmes; ‘The Adventure of Lady Frances Carfax’

Holmes was addicted to London. And at any rate, as he so wisely said, it would be unwise for him to leave the metropolis for any extended period of time, and certainly never to leave the confines of the British Isles. His world was the West End of the capital of the glorious British Empire. And there he remained until he retired and became a bee-keeper. So what are these famous locations which are peppered throughout the books? Where are they and what are they all about? A great number of fictional locations and addresses such as 221B Baker Street and the Diogenes Club, of which Sherlock’s older brother Mycroft is a member, are included in the Holmesian Canon, but there is also an equally large number of actual London landmarks buildings mentioned in the five dozen stories that make up the complete Holmesian collection. This article will introduce you to as many factual London locations as are mentioned in the canon as it is possible to do. We shall start with where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself started…

A Note on Addresses

Where possible, the addresses of the buildings mentioned in this article have been supplied, together with their postcodes. London postcodes are determined by compass-direction. ‘N’ is North, ‘S’ is South, ‘E’ and ‘W’ are obviously ‘East’ and ‘West’ respectively. There are also postcodes starting with ‘C’ which stands for ‘Central’. So ‘EC’ stands for “East Central’, and so on. Additional letters and numbers indicate further subdivisions of postal districts within the main district.

The Criterion Restaurant

“…I was standing at the Criterion Bar when someone tapped me on the shoulder…”
– Dr. J.H. Watson; ‘A Study in Scarlet’

Entrance to the Criterion Restaurant

Address: 224, Piccadilly, Piccadilly W1J 9HS

The Criterion is one of the most famous restaurants in London. Founded in 1874, it has been one of the city’s greatest dining hotspots for over 130 years. Famous people such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, science-fiction writer H.G. Wells and politician Sir Winston Churchill have all dined here. The restaurant is vast, grand and luxurious and the perfect place for a down-on-his-luck army surgeon such as Dr. Watson to bump into his old friend, Stamford, who would take him to meet the legendary Mr. Sherlock Holmes. The restaurant even commemorates this groundshaking and historical meeting…

The Long Bar at the Criterion Restaurant

The Long Bar of the Criterion Restaurant as it appeared in Holmes’s day

The ‘Alpha Inn’ (the Museum Tavern)

“There are a few of us who frequent the Alpha Inn, near the Museum…”
– Mr. Henry Baker; ‘The Blue Carbuncle’

Address: 49 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury WC1B 3BA

There is no ‘Alpha Inn’ contained within the confines of London (at least, not in Holmes’s day), however, following the directions in ‘The Red Headed League’, we do arrive at the Museum Tavern, a popular restaurant and drinking establishment across the road from the British Museum, from which the building derives its name. The Museum Tavern was one of Doyle’s favourite drinking-spots and he most likely used it as the model for the Alpha in his stories. Directly across Great Russell Street is…

The British Museum

“…we are to be found in the Museum itself during the day…”
– Mr. Henry Baker; ‘The Red-Headed League’

Address: Great Russell Street, WC1

Established in 1753, the British Museum is one of the largest museums of history and culture in the world, with over seven million display-pieces. The Museum also used to house the British Library, until 1997 when that institution moved to its own premises. The British Museum underwent many changes over the centuries and has been expanded several times. At one point due to expansion projects, the land around the Museum was the largest construction-site in Europe.

The Admiralty

“…As to the Admiralty, it is buzzing like an overturned beehive…”
– Mycroft Holmes; ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’

Address: 26 Whitehall, London

The Old Admiralty Building (and the nearby Admiralty Arch) were the office-buildings that up until the 1960s, housed the Admiralty, the government department that oversaw the running and management of the British Royal Navy. The Admiralty was replaced in 1964 by a new body, the Admiralty Board, which still uses the assembled Admiralty buildings today.

The Admiralty Arch

The Anerley Arms Hotel

“…I spent the night at the Anerley Arms…”
– Mr. John Hector McFarlane; ‘The Norwood Builder’

Address: 2, Ridsdale Road, Anerley, SE20 8AG

A hotel and public house in Anerley, London. This is where John Hector McFarlane stayed after his long night working with Mr. Jonas Oldacre, who tried to frame him for murder.

St. Bartholomew’s Hospital

“…I recognised young Stamford, who had been a dresser under me at Barts…”
– Dr. J.H. Watson; ‘A Study in Scarlet’

St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. Main Entrance

Address: West Smithfield, EC1A, 7BE

Known simply as ‘Barts’ to most Londoners, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital is one of the oldest medical institutions in London. It is the oldest hospital still in operation in London and the buildings that make up the wings of the hospital were built in the mid-18th century, even though the hospital’s existence on its current site goes back to 1123 AD. The medical college at Barts was founded in 1843 and would’ve been familiar institution to a physician such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Carlton Club

“…The Carlton Club will find me…”
– Sir James Damery; ‘The Illustrious Client’

Address: 69, St. James’s Street

The Carlton Club is a prominent London gentleman’s club for members of the British conservative political party. The club was founded in 1832 and has moved premises three times since its creation. The first clubhouse was too small and the members moved to another clubhouse in 1835, next door to another famous London club, the Reform Club. Here the club remained (although the clubhouse building itself was rebuilt and redesigned several times) until 1940. The Carlton Club suffered a direct hit during an air-raid of the Blitz on London during the Second World War. So complete was the destruction that the members did not bother trying to rebuild, but instead moved to their third and current location at 69 St. James’s, the building pictured above.

Charing Cross Hospital

“I would suggest, for example, that a presentation to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt. When the initials C.C. are placed before that hospital, the words ‘Charing Cross’ very naturally suggest themselves”
– Sherlock Holmes; ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Charing Cross Hospital, London; 1939

Address: Fulham Palace Road W6 8RF

Charing Cross Hospital was founded in 1823 to serve the medical needs of the West End of London. Originally called the West London Infirmary, it received its current name in 1827. It moved from its original location near Charing Cross in London, in 1834 and moved again in the years following World War Two. The current hospital structure is built on the site of the old Fullham Hospital on Fullham Palace Road. Despite the change in location, the hospital has retained its ‘Charing Cross’ name.

Charing Cross Station

“…My collection of ‘M’s is a fine one…and here is…Matthews, who knocked out my left canine in the waiting room at Charing Cross”
– Sherlock Holmes; ‘The Empty House’

Address: Charing Cross Station, the Strand WC2N 5HS

Opened in 1864, Charing Cross Station is one of the main railway stations that service the city of London. In operation for over a hundred and forty years, Charing Cross has undergone numerous renovations and restorations in its long history, from general maintenance-work to full restorations, such as the one carried out on the station between November 2009 and August of 2010.

Claridges Hotel

“You can report to me tomorrow in London, Martha, at Claridges Hotel”
– Sherlock Holmes; ‘His Last Bow’

Address: Cnr. Brook Street and Davies Street, Mayfair, W1K 4HR

Claridges is one of the most famous grand hotels in London. Opened in 1812, it received the name Claridges in 1854. The original Claridges Hotel was deemed too small and was demolished in 1894. A more modern hotel with elevators, running water and private en-suite bathrooms for every room, was opened in 1898. Claridges has had a long association with British royalty and aristoracy starting in the Victorian era, but increasing markedly after World War One. The hotel was expanded in the 1920s and enjoys patronage in more recent times, by a different kind of royalty…the kind that hails from Hollywood. Big names such as Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, Brad Pitt and Audrey Hepburn have all stayed at Claridges over the years.

The Imperial Theatre

“My Father is dead, Mr Holmes. He was James Smith, who conducted the orchestra at the old Imperial Theatre.”
– Violet Smith; ‘The Solitary Cyclist’

Address: Westminster, SW1H 9NH

The Imperial Theatre (previously called the Aquarium Theatre) was opened in April of 1876. It had a seating capacity of 1,300 people. It was demolished in 1907.

St. James’s Hall

“When I saw him that afternoon, so enwrapped in the music at St. James’s Hall I felt that an evil time might be coming upon those whom he had set himself to hunt down”
– Dr. J.H. Watson; ‘The Red-Headed League’

Address: Regent Street

St. James’s Hall was a prominent concert hall in London during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It was opened on the 25th of March, 1858 and could hold over 2,000 concert-goers for each performance. For the next forty-seven years, St. James’s was one of the most popular musical performance venues in London. Even Charles Dickens went there to give public readings of his famous novels. The hall was closed in the 1900s and was eventually pulled down in 1905. The photo above is of the interior of St. James’s as it appeared during its last concert in its closing year.

King’s College Hospital

“After I graduated, I continued to devote myself to research, occupying a minor position in King’s College Hospital…’
– Dr. Percy Trevelyan; ‘The Resident Patient’

Address: Denmark Hill, SE5 9RS

The King’s College Hospital was opened in 1840 as a small teaching hospital for medical students studying at the King’s College, London, operating out of the St. Clements Dane workhouse on Portugal Street. The hospital was overcrowded and constantly busy. Joseph Lister, the pioneer of modern safe surgery through the introduction of sterilisation, performed some of his first successful operations at the King’s College Hospital in the 1870s. Due to changing circumstances, the hospital moved to new, purpose-built facilities in 1909, with innovations such as electrical power for telephones and electrical lighting. The hospital treated several civilian injuries sustained by bombing during the Blitz of 1940-1941.

The Langham Hotel

“He telegraphed to me from London…and directed me to come down at once, giving the Langham Hotel as his address”
– Mary Morstan; ‘A Sign of Four’

“You will find me at the Langham under the name of the Count Von Kramm”
– The King of Bohemia; ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’

Address: 1C Portland Place, Regent Street, W1B

The Langham Hotel is one of the grandest and oldest hotels in London. And for its time, it was also one of the most modern. Opened in 1865, it featured innovations that wouldn’t be seen in other hotels for decades to come, things like private bathrooms, elevators and even electrical lighting, commencing in the 1870s. The hotel has proved incredibly popular throughout the decades and celebrity guests included the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, cricketer Don Bradman, Diana, Princess of Wales, Winston Churchill, French president Charles de Gaulle and actor Charlie Sheen (not even the best five-star hotel in the world is perfect). Due to its high-class customers, the Langham very nearly went bust during the Great Depression, but survived to become one of London’s most famous hotels.

Lowther Arcade

“…Drive to the Strand end of the Lowther Arcade…”
– Sherlock Holmes; ‘The Final Problem’

Address: 437 Strand, London

The Lowther Arcade was a popular shopping-arcade in London during the Victorian era (comparable with the famous Burlington Arcade), and was full of all kinds of speciality shops, from jewellery, musical instruments and children’s toys.

The Lyceum Theatre

“Be at the third pillar from the left outside the Lyceum Theatre tonight at seven o’clock…”
– Thaddeus Sholto; ‘The Sign of Four’

Address: Wellingon St, WC2E, 7RQ

The Lyceum is one of London’s most famous West End theatres. A playhouse called the Lyceum has existed on Wellington St. since 1772. At first, the theatre struggled and only by constantly changing could it hope to ever make a success of itself. Its first stroke of luck came in the year 1809. The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, caught fire and the theatre’s company moved to the Lyceum while their own theatre was being rebuilt. It was at this time that the Lord Chamberlain (the man in charge of theatres) granted the Lyceum official status as a performing theatre.

In 1830, the Lyceum burnt down and was rebuilt and reopened in 1834. Now, the theatre’s fortunes began to change. Big names started working at the Lyceum, such as W.S. Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan fame and most famously of all, the actor and eventual manager of the Lyceum, Sir Henry Irving, one of the greatest stage actors of the late Victorian period.

Fire ripped through the Lyceum once again at the turn of the century and it was decided that the building could not be saved. It was pulled down and gradually rebuilt, starting in 1904 and reopening in 1907. The Victorian-era facade remains, but the theatre’s interior had been completely redesigned. The Lyceum was almost demolished outright in 1939 due to plans to widen Wellington Street, but these plans fell through and the theatre survives to this day.

Northumberland Hotel (‘Sherlock Holmes’ public house)

“…The address: ‘Sir Henry Baskerville, Northumberland Hotel’, was printed in rough characters…”
– Dr. J.H. Watson; ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Address: 10-11, Northumberland Street, Westminster, WC2N 5DB

The Northumberland Hotel as an establishment no longer exists. The building it occupied still stands, however, and it has been transformed into the Sherlock Holmes public house, dedicated to all things Holmesian. It even has a recreation of Holmes and Watson’s sitting-room in it and a menu comprised entirely of Holmesian-style dishes and dish-names! How about trying the Thor Bridge angus burger with tomatoes, gherkins and chips for ten pounds, twenty-five pence?

Paddington Station

“I happened to live at no very great distance from Paddington”
– Dr. J.H. Watson; ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’

Paddington Station in Holmes’s day

Address: Paddington Station, W2 1RH

Paddington Station is one of the most famous buildings in London. A station has existed on the site since 1838, but a permanent railway station called Paddington didn’t finally materialise until 1854. In popular culture, Paddington is closely tied to the children’s character ‘Paddington Bear’ and to the book ‘4:50 from Paddington’ by Agatha Christie.

Scotland Yard (Old Scotland Yard)

“We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard”
– Inspector Lestrade; ‘The Six Napoleons’

Address: 4, Whitehall Place.

Scotland Yard is the name of the headquarters of the London Metropolitan Police Service (which was established in 1829). The Metropolitan Police have moved their headquarters since Holmes’s day, but in Victorian times, they were located at a suite of buildings on Whitehall Place and were located there between 1887 until 1967, when they moved to their new (and current) headquarters, which had more space for the growing police-force.

Simpsons in the Strand

“When we have finished at the police station I think that something nutritious at Simpson’s would not be out of place.”
– Sherlock Holmes; ‘The Dying Detective’

“I met him by appointment that evening at Simpson’s”
– Dr. J.H. Watson; ‘The Illustrious Client’

Address: 100 Strand, WC2R 0EW

Simpsons in the Strand is probably the most famous restaurant in London. Simpsons opened in 1828 and was originally a chess-club and coffeehouse, but it quickly grew into a London dining institution, at which only the best and most notable people of their day ever sat down to have dinner. Men like George Bernard Shaw, prime ministers Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, Charles Dickens, artist Vincent Van Gough and of course, famous pair of fictional sleuths, messers Sherlock Holmes and his best friend, John Hamish Watson, M.D.

The main dining-room, Simpsons in the Strand, London

The restaurant gets its name from the forward-thinking caterer, Mr. John Simpson, who had grand visions for this place and who wanted to make it more than just a simple coffeehouse. Simpsons in the Strand can give thanks to chef Thomas Davey, who insisted that only the best British food should ever be served there, although knowing the international stereotype of British food, one has to wonder what kind of ‘best’ that is. But regardless, Simpsons’ reputation has endured for nearly two hundred years. So insistent was Davey on the ‘Britishness’ of Simpsons that he refuesd even to allow the cards on the dining-tables to be called ‘menus’. Instead, they were to be known, and only known, as ‘Bills of Fare’.

10 Downing Street

“We were fortunate in finding that Lord Holdhurst was still in his chambers at Downing Street”
– Dr. J.H. Watson; ‘The Naval Treaty’

Address: Downing Street, London.

Number 10, Downing Street, has been the official Lonon residence to the British Prime Minister (who also holds the office of First Lord of the Treasury) since the mid 1700s. It has been restored and rebuilt several times over the last two-hundred odd years due to neglect, age and at least two instances of bomb-attacks. One attack during the Blitz saw the kitchen of Downing Street destroyed by a direct hit from a German bomb. Only quick thinking on the part of Winston Churchill, who had ordered all staff out of the kitchen minutes before, prevented a potentially devastating loss of life.

One of the more curious offices held at 10 Downing Street is that of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. That’s right…A cat! Almost continuously since 1924, a cat has been ’employed’ at 10 Downing Street, holding the office of Chief Mouser, whose job it is to keep mice away from the Prime Minister’s residence. The current chief mouser is Larry, pictured below:

Waterloo Station

“[Advise] me as to what I should do with Sir Henry Baskerville, who arrives at Waterloo Station” – Dr. Mortimer looked at his watch – “in exactly one hour and a quarter”
– Mr. James Mortimer, M.R.C.S; ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Address: Waterloo Station, City of London SE1 8SW

Waterloo Station was opened in London in 1848, originally called Waterloo Bridge Station. It was renamed to its current title in 1886. The main reason for naming the station ‘Waterloo Bridge’ was because there were already a number of other stations nearby also called ‘Waterloo’, which created untold and immeasurable confusion for travellers in the earlier years of the station’s operation. The station was hit heavily by bombs during the Second World War, but the limited amount of damage meant that the station was restored to its original condition with relative ease in postwar years.

Woolwich Arsenal (Royal Arsenal, Woolwich)

“The man’s name was Arthur Cadogan West, twenty-seven years of age, unmarried and a clerk at Woolwich Arsenal”
– Dr. J.H. Watson; ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’

Address: Woolwich SE18 6SP

The Royal Arsenal, Woolwich (pronounced ‘Woolich’) has existed since Stuart times in the 1670s. It wasn’t until 1805, however, that it was named the Royal Arsenal. The Arsenal played important roles during the Crimean, First and Second World Wars. Parts of the arsenal were shut down over the years after the Second World War and the site ceased to have an active military role in 1994, after which the Arsenal was turned into a military museum.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to extend my personal thanks to my fellow members of the Holmesian.net Sherlock Holmes fan-forum who provided me with the suggestions and information which aided in the completion of this posting.

13/06/2011 by Scheong

Arbeit Macht Frei: The Real Schindler’s List

Oskar Schindler – An industrialist, a war-profiteer, a German and a member of the Nazi Party. A saviour of over a thousand lives.

The story of Oskar Schindler is one of paradox; a Nazi saving Jews. Whoever heard of such a ridiculous thing? And yet, it is true. And it is one of the most famous stories to come out of the hell of the Second World War. It is a story of unimaginable hardship, terror, uncertainty, panic, hope and desperation. It’s a story that’s centered around row after row of letters typewritten onto a sheaf of notepaper. It’s about luck, chance and amazing fortune. It is almost fantastical, in the truest sense of the word.

Who was Oskar Schindler?

Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist. He was born on the 28th of April, 1908. He married his wife, Emilie, in March of 1928 and eleven years later, joined the German National Socialist Worker’s Partry…the Nazis.

Oskar Schindler; 1946. Photographed with some of the Schindlerjuden. He’s standing on the right, holding his hat in his left hand

Schindler had been a businessman before the outbreak of the Second World War, but never a successful one. During the Depression he started many businesses but for one reason or another, they all went bankrupt. This all changed when Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939, starting the Second World War.

After the Nazi occupation of Poland, Schindler moved East and got involved in the black market. Being a member of the Nazi Party meant that he could mix and mingle with the Gestapo, the S.S. and prominent Nazis in Poland. His connections meant that he was able to purchase an “Aryanised business”…that is to say, a Jewish business that had been turned over to non-Jewish (usually German) businessmen. Schindler eventually found himself as the director of a factory in the Polish city of Krakow which manufactured enamelware cooking equipment, the Deutsche Emaillewarenfabrik. With this factory, Schindler would slowly start to rise, after years of failure.

Schindler and the Jews

Schindler was nothing if not an opportunist. If something good came his way, he jumped at it. When he saw his chance to join a powerful political party, he jumped at it. When he saw his chance to make his fortune in Poland, he jumped at it. When he saw his chance to take over ownership of a Jewish factory, he jumped at it. And when he saw his chance to get cheap labour from the Jews…you bet he jumped on that too. Someone buy this guy a trampoline…

Schindler was completely indifferent to the suffering of the Jews. He didn’t care. Why should he? They were an inferior race and of no interest to him. But…they were cheaper to employ than non-Jews. And always out to save a few Zloty somewhere to make more somewhere else, Schindler started employing them, purely as a cost-cutting measure. Zloty, by the way, is the currency of Poland, although it would’ve been German currency (the Deutschmark) at the time. Jewish Poles were cheap and they were plentiful. Much cheaper than employing non-Jewish Poles, which is where it all started.

The Jews in Schindler’s factory were grateful for their jobs. By the early 1940s, the Nazis were establishing ghettos in Poland where all Jews were forced to live. There was a ghetto in Warsaw, a ghetto in Lodz and you bet…there was a ghetto in Krakow as well. But luckily for Schindler’s workers, his factory was located outside the boundaries fo the ghetto, which meant that they could leave the confines of the ghetto each day and go to work and at the same time, do some black-market trading and buy whateve they needed, sometimes using the goods that they manufactured in the factory for bartering.

Employing the Jews

Schindler was not interested in saving the Jews. He saw them as his workforce. As a way to make money. And if the Jews were taken away, he would lose money. He would have to employ non-Jewish Poles, which would cost him more and lose him more money. If he lost a worker, he would have to train another worker to do the same job, which wasted time, and which lost him more money…the cycle goes on.

But this all changed in 1942.

Starting at the end of May, 1942, Jews in the Krakow Ghetto were being deported to the surrounding death-camps and labour-camps. Belzec and Plazsow respectively. When he witnessed Jews being shot in the streets of Krakow, Schindler suddenly realised how delicate everything was. Over night, he could lose his entire workforce! And he began to feel terrible about what was happening to the Jews, deciding that he had to do something to save them.

Schindler did this the only way he knew how. By getting them to work. Just like you see in Spielberg’s famous movie, passes, work-permits and identity papers were forged on a vast scale. Schindler was doing everything he could, using his position as a member of the Nazi Party, to save as many Jews as he could. He turned writers, musicians, teachers, professors, lawyers, rabbis and other ordinary Polish Jews into…metal-workers, machine-operators, mechanics, welders, riveters, smithies, carpenters…he gave them any kind of tradesman’s job that he could think of, that would mean that they were “essential workers”. To be an “essential worker” meant that your occupation was essential to the German war-effort. To Schindler’s Jews, this was literally a matter of life and death. Thanks to Schindler’s intervention, hundreds of Jews were saved from going to the Belzec Extermination Camp.

Instead, they ended up in Plazsow, the labour camp. Plazsow was no Florida funpark, but it was a damn sight better than Belzec. Schindler even managed to get his Jews segregated from the other labourers in the camp so that they could live amongst themselves and feel safe. Having his own sub-camp for his Jews was essential to Schindler. He impressed on the camp commandant, Amon Goeth, that production would suffer severely if he had to pick his workers out of the thousands of others in the main camp at Plazsow every morning for work! It would be much more convenient for everyone if they had their own camp. Goeth agreed to this. What he didn’t know was that, by having his own camp, Schindler could smuggle food, medicine, clothing and other essential supplies to his Jews to keep them safe and healthy.
Schindler’s enamelware factory in Krakow as it appears today

All the while, Schindler was bribing people left, right and center in order to keep his Jews safe; everyone from Amon Goeth the camp commandant, right down to the guards who patrolled the camp. They were now over a thousand Jews working for Schindler, ranging in ages from children aged ten or younger, all the way up to retired grandparents in their sixties or seventies. Most of them were Polish, although Jews from other countries also found themselves working for Schindler. In some cases, entire families were saved and mothers and fathers worked together in the factory alongside their children. This was largely due to the influence of Stern who deliberately gave jobs to his fellow Jews to save them from the death camps.

Itzhak Stern

Portrayed in the 1993 film by the marvellous Ben Kingsley, Itzhak Stern was Schindler’s Jewish accountant. Stern was responsible for the daily running of many of Schindler’s operations and it was he who helped create all the forged employment papers that would save so many Jews from deportations to death camps, and instead, find them working in the relative safety of Schindler’s enamelware factory. He kept Schindler’s books in order and made sure that everything ran smoothly. He helped Schindler run his black-market operations and the bribes that he would give to other Germans to ensure that his factory and his Jews were kept safe. Together, Schindler and Stern worked the factory, striving to protect the Jews. Hundreds flocked to the enamelware factory, even if they had never worked in a factory in their lives.

Stern and Schindler worked under layer after layer of lies, deceit and deception, all a necessary cover to protect their growing role in saving the Jews of Krakow. Apart from giving ‘non-essential’ Jews the false paperwork to allow them to move out of the ghetto and work in the factory, Stern and Schindler even falsified the factory’s employment books! Employment-lists which had the names of every single worker written on them, were all altered or changed in one way or another. The elderly working within the factory had their dates of birth changed. Instead of being seventy, they were now fifty. Instead of being a librarian, they were now a welder. Children as young as ten suddenly became young men and women in their mid-twenties who instead of being schoolboys and schoolgirls, were suddenly metal-polishers, buffers and grinders. If the Gestapo ever took it upon themselves to examine the books…they would see a perfect German Aryan factory run by a German who employed Jews who were all professionals in their respective fields, even if they’d never picked up a welding-torch, riveting-gun or operated a metal punch-press in their lives.

Schindler’s List

The most famous part of Schindler’s efforts to save the Jews is his LIST. The famous list of over 1,000 ‘Schindlerjuden’ (literally, ‘Schindler’s Jews’), who were supposedly “essential workers” in his factory. Where did the list come from and what is its significance in this story?

The year is 1944. Schindler and Stern are struggling to keep up appearances. Schindler continues to bribe prominent Gestapo and S.S. officers and continues to try and protect his workers from everything that he can, from starvation, disease and brutal mistreatment at the hands of the camp guards and officers in Plazsow, who would visit the factory frequently to torment the workers. Schindler objected vehemently to such treatment. Short of actually showing sympathy to the Jews, he used the cover that the guards constant visits made his workers fearful. This, in turn, effected worker-morale which in turn, effected the factory’s output, which in turn, effected the factory’s contributions to the war-effort and to the overall good of der Vaterland – ‘The Fatherland’ – Germany.

It was around this time that the winds of change started blowing. Labour-camps such as Treblinka, Majdanek and Plazsow were being shut down. Along with the ghettos, they too were being ‘liquidated’, a wonderfully euphamistic term that meant that all the Jews contained within these institutions would be sent directly to the death camps, most likely Auschwitz-Berkinau. Schindler began to realise that time was running out.

Writing the List

It was blatantly clear to Schindler, Stern and every single one of the factory-workers, what would happen. The camp would be liquidated and all the Jews, without exception, would be sent to Auschwitz. Desperate to try anything, Schindler gained control of a German munitions factory. He would move his Jews there. He explained to Goeth that since ‘his Jews’ were already experienced and talented metalworkers, machinists and press-operators, it would make much more sense that he move them to the new factory and camp, instead of sending them off to Auschwitz. If that happened, then Schindler would have to find a whole new labour-force and train them from scratch, about how to operate machines and work metal and polish shell-casings so that they would fit into the cannon-breeches properly and a whole heap of other piddly things. And, it would be disastrous for the Fatherland if production of munitions would fall behind schedule, wouldn’t it?

To ensure that he could keep his Jews, Schindler needed a record of them. He needed documented proof of every single worker under his factory roof. He needed to know their names, ages (real or imagined), professions (again, real or imagined), he had to know their religions and their nationalities. He needed…

A list.

It was this list, every single last letter typed up by Itzhak Stern himself, that saved 1,200 Jewish lives from almost certain death in Auschwitz. Stern’s entry of his own name lists him as:

STERN – Isak – 25.1.01 (date of birth) – Bilanzbuchalter (Accountant).

The significance of the list is that every name on it was listed as an ‘essential worker’ for the German war-effort and therefore would be spared from extermination. Being on the list was literally life or death for hundreds of Schindler’s Jews. As the Schindlerjuden lined up to board the train going to the new camp and factory, they prayed that Stern hadn’t accidently forgotten to include them on the list!

The Schindlerjuden were packed into cattle-cars and transported by train to their new munitions factory in Czechoslovakia. The trains wre all divided up. One held men with their wives and children. Another train held women exclusively. It must’ve been absolute horror to Schindler and his Jews when the womens’ train took a wrong turn and ended up in the very place that everyone dreaded! – Auschwitz! It was only very hasty action and a lot of bribing on Schindler’s part, as well as his personal intervention at Auschwitz, that saved them all from death.

Away from the eyes of the S.S. and the Gestapo, Schindler and his Jews finally found a haven. They lived and worked in the new munitions factory. All of them. Even Schindler and his wife, Emilie. They could have lived in the villa provided for them in the hill overlooking the factory, but Schindler was so terrified of the S.S. bursting into the factory in the middle of the night to cart off his workforce that he never lived there, spending every night in his office.

Life settled into a sort of rhythm now. They would work all day and relax at night. Jewish holidays were observed and time off was given to celebrate them. The Sabbath was observed and work would cease on Sundays. Workers who died in the factory (either through accident, illness or old age…never through the intervention of the factory’s guards) were given traditional Jewish funerals, even though this was illegal under Nazi rule.

But in and amongst all this relative tranquilty and peace, Schindler was still playing games with the Gestapo the S.S. and other Nazis. As Liam Neeson famously said in the film ‘Schindler’s List’ – “If this factory ever makes a shell that can actually be fired, I’ll be a very unhappy man“.

And he was true to his word.

Schindler deliberately sabotaged the German war-effort. Every morning he would wander around the factory, fiddling with the machines. He would remove parts to make them break down. He would recalibrate them and readjust them so that the casings that they made for the shells were just that little bit too big, or too small, so that they wouldn’t fit into the guns they were meant to be fired out of. Screws were missing. Blasting-caps would suddenly not work. He did everything he could to make sure that not a single round of ammunition manufactured by his factory would ever pass quality-control.

The End of the War

Schindler and his Jews had no illusions about what would happen to Schindler and his wife when the War ended. As a Nazi and as a profiteer of slave-labour, as a persecutor of the Jews, he would be hunted by everyone – the Russians, the British, the French, the Americans…he had to escape.

Knowing that Schindler’s chances of survival were slim, the Schindlerjuden banded together. They drafted a letter that they hoped, would explain to any Allied soldiers or to other Jews, who Schindler was and the nature of his work, sparing him from death or imprisonment. This letter, translated into English, may be read here. Schindler even gave a speech to his workers before leaving. He gave the women cloth to make clothes or to sell on the black market. He gave them all a bottle of wine each, again to sell on the black market for badly needed money. He implored on his Jews to resist the temptation to take out revenge-attacks on Nazis and Germans after the end of the War and then, he and his wife fled into the night.

Schindler after the War

For all the good he did during the War, Schindler’s luck never changed. In the 1930s he was a failing businessman. In the 1950s and 60s, he continued to be failure of a businessman. Every venture he tried led to nothing. He even set up a cement-making factory with the help of his former Jewish workers, but even that petered out to nothing. He died on the 9th of October, 1974 at the age of sixty-six. Schindler’s accountant, and eventually, lifelong friend, Itzhak Stern, died in 1969 at the age of 68.

Schindler’s Grave. It is a Jewish tradition to place a rock on or around a gravestone when paying respects to the deceased

The List Today

Amazingly, Schindler’s List survives to this day. Two copies are known to exist. One was typed up around 1942 and listed all the workers employed in Schindler’s enamelware factory. This one was discovered in 1999. A second list was discovered ten years later. This one is dated April, 1945 and listed all the Jewish workers employed in Schindler’s defective munitions factory. The original texts of Schindler’s List, along with thousands of other Schindler-related documents including photographs, speeches and Schindler’s personal papers, are now preserved in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel.

Do you want to read the list? The original German text is here, and a scan of the original 1945 list may be read here. The 1945 list ends at 801 entries, but the true number of people saved is nearly 1,200.

10/06/2011 by Scheong

The Shortest Day: The Start of the Second World War

Just a few days ago, we passed the sixth of June, 2011; the anniversary of “D-Day” and the beginning of the Allied push to destroy Nazi Germany and liberate the oppressed peoples of the European continent. Everyone knows what happened on that day; how they stormed the beaches and faced remarkable resistence, how fighter-planes dominated the skies above, keeping the ground-troops protected from potential enemy air-attacks and how Tom Hanks and a group of Yanks blasted a hole through the German defenses using nothing but balls, brains and a few feet of Bangalore Torpedo.

But what about the other end of the story? What was it like on the very first day of the Second World War? We all know the big facts, but what about the little facts hidden in between them? For example, did you know that within hours of war being declared, it was military personnel halfway around the world in Australia, who fired the first Allied shots of the War? Or that a British ocean-liner was sunk by a German U-boat just hours after Britain declared war against Germany? Or that air-raid sirens were tested in London, causing mass panic? It’s all true.

Preparations for War

On the First of September, 1939, Germany invaded Poland after it was declared that the Poles had attacked German border-posts (a falsehood; no such attacks were ever launched by the Poles). Great Britain and France, allies of the Polish nation, were obliged to take action for the defence of Poland and began making military preparations, ordering the mobilisation of their armed forces. In England, evacuation of children and expectant or young mothers was already underway in the appropriately-named ‘Operation Pied-Piper’. A blackout was enforced all over England starting on the 1st of September and it would remain in place unil April of 1945.

Germany did not declare war on Poland formally and no declaration of war was ever signed by Germany against Poland. World War Two starting as a formal declaration of the commencement of hostilities by one country against another did not start until the third of September, 1939. But a lot more things happened on that day than the signing of a simple piece of paper. What follows is a breakdown of the significant events of that first day of the Second World War…

The Shortest Day

All times are in Greenwich Mean Time.

Sunday, 3rd September, 1939

9:00am – ENGLAND – Sir Nevile Henderson, British Ambassador to Germany, sends his final diplomatic note to the German government, calling for an immediate cease of all German military action in Poland.

11:15am – ENGLAND – Sir Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister of the time, goes on national radio and addresses the British people. He delivers the now-famous words that “…consequently, this country is at war with Germany”.

11:30am – ENGLAND – Air-raid sirens sound across London, but it is a false-alarm. Jangled by the news of war, Londoners panic as they believe their city is under attack and run for cover.

12:30pm – FRANCE – The French government issues an ultimatum to Germany to cease all military action. Germany refuses.

3:00pm – FRANCE – The French government formally declares war on Germany.

6:00pm – ENGLAND – King George VI broadcasts his first wartime speech to the nation, live from Buckingham Palace.

A (staged) photograph of King George VI giving his famous, first wartime speech. For the actual broadcast, the king was standing, sans jacket, in front of a lectern in a small room that was specially prepared for the occasion. This snapshot was taken after the broadcast was made.

7:40pm – ENGLAND – British cruiseship, the S.S. Athenia, is torpedoed by German submarine U-30. It is the first British shipping-loss of the Second World War.

The S.S. Athenia as she appeared in 1933, docked here in Montreal Harbour, Canada. 117 people died when she was sunk in 1939

9:15pm – AUSTRALIA – The first Allied shot of the Second World War is fired. Being alerted that Australia was at war, troops manning the powerful coastal artillery-cannon at Fort Nepean near Melbourne, Australia, fire a shot-across-the-bow (a warning-shot) at a vessel steaming into Port Phillip Bay, which refused to stop for inspection. The ship turned out to be an Australian freight-ship.

Interesting Note: The main gun at Fort Nepean also fired the first Allied shot of the First World War back on the 4th of August, 1914, when it ordered an escaping German cargo-ship to heave-to. If it failed to do so, orders were given that the next shot fired was to be done so in order to sink her…wisely, the ship’s captain turned around and steamed back to Melbourne. He and his crew were arrested and imprisoned.

The Guns of Nepean. Through these two gun-barrels, were fired the first Allied shots of both World Wars. The one on the left fired the first shot of the First World War, the one on the right fired the first shot of the Second World War

By the end of the first day, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand and India had declared war on Germany and had started a conflict that would last for nearly six years. It is to this day, the largest armed conflict ever seen. On the evening of the Third of September, 1939, everyone on earth went to bed knowing that when they woke up the next day, the world would never be the same again.

03/06/2011 by Scheong

Pen Profile: Vest Pocket Fountain Pens

Admittedly, the range of fountain pens we have around today is pretty small. They’re all roughly the same size, they all hold roughly the same amount of ink and they all have the same selection of nibs.

Back when fountain pens were new, things were a lot different.

Fountain pens were once luxury items. To own one was a big status-symbol. Most people at the turn of the last century were still using steel-nibbed dip-pens to do the majority of their writing. Schools in many countries continued using dip-pens well into the 1940s. Fountain pens were expensive things to own and the people who were lucky enough to afford one of these newfangled ‘reservoir pens’ usually only owned one pen, which they used endlessly until it broke, before they purchased another.

As fountain pens became more common and gradually, cheaper, towards the early 1900s when mass production increased output and design-improvements made fountain pens more desirable, more people started wanting them. And they wanted different styles and types of pens as well. As the fountain pen became more and more essential to everyday life, people saw the necessity for keeping one near them at all times.

This was tricky when you consider that most fountain pens made between the 1880s-1910s…didn’t come with pocket-clips, the kind that all pens have today. Such fancy and mindblowing additions to the pen as a pocket-clip wouldn’t show up until the First World War. That’s where the ringtop fountain pen comes in.

Ringtop vest-pocket pens

Without the presence of pocket-clips, it was necessary to find other ways to keep pens from running away from their owners. One of the main methods of keeping a tab on your pen was to have a ring attached to the top of the cap (something that became possible when threaded, screw-on caps were invented, that held onto the body of the pen much more securely than comparable slip-on caps of the period).

There’s a big misconception that ringtop pens are all women’s pens. THIS IS NOT TRUE.

Ringtop fountain pens were common for only a very short period of time, from the 1900s up until the end of the 1920s and they were marketed (and manufactured) for both men and women. It’s easy to tell the difference between men’s and women’s pens purely from their lengths. Women’s pens were longer (four inches or more); they were worn with a chain or a ribbon around the neck, like a necklace. Men’s ringtop pens are significantly smaller, generally being no longer than about three and a half inches.

Why?

If the history of consumer-goods has taught us anything, it’s that women’s products are almost always smaller than men’s. Women’s watches are smaller. Women’s pens are smaller. Rings and chains for women’s jewellery are usually much thinner than men’s jewellery. So why are men’s pens in the case of ringtops, smaller than women’s?

Ringtop pens for men were designed as ‘vest-pocket’ pens. They usually had the code-letter ‘V’ or ‘VP’ (for Vest/Vest-Pocket) heat-stamped or engraved into them. Pens like this were deliberately kept smaller than women’s pens because they were designed to be clipped to a man’s double albert watch-chain and worn in one of the two watch-pockets of his waistcoat (or ‘vest’). On a watch-chain along with a pocket-watch, the setup would look like this:

My vest-pocket fountain pen and pocketwatch. Pen: 1925 Wahl Art Deco vest-pocket fountain pen. Watch: 1950s Ball railroad chronometer

In the days when men still wore waistcoats (a stylistic choice I still carry on) and pocketwatches were still popular (another stylistic choice I keep alive), vest-pocket pens were a popular writing-instrument. Compact, convenient and nigh impossible to lose; even if the pen did fall out of your pocket, the chain clipped to the ring on the cap would prevent it from getting lost.

The End of Ringtop Pens

Ringtop pens for men died out by the 1930s. Pocketwatches were still being made, waistcoats were still popular and people were still combining the two, but the truth was that demand for this pen, which had become little more of a novelty by this time, was dropping fast. The arrival in the mid-1910s of pens with permanent pocket-clips meant that keeping a pen securely about your person with a ringtop cap and chain was no longer necessary. By the mid-1930s, production of both men’s and women’s ringtop pens had come to an end.

Today, ringtop pens are no-longer made as there’s no market for them. They do still exist, as curious reminders of a bygone age, if as nothing else, though. You can still buy them at pen-shows, vintage pen shops and online from pen-dealers and repairers, but unless you’re intending to wear it on a ribbon or necklace around your throat or on the end of a watch-chain, they’ll probably have to make up part of your desktop pen inventory due to the risk of them falling out of your pocket (unless you store them in a pen-pouch when you’re carrying them around).

02/06/2011 by Scheong

D-Day and the Battle of Normandy

With the anniversary of D-Day coming up, this article is written to commemorate the original and most famous of all D-Days…the sixth of June, 1944.

The Second World War is famous for a lot of reasons. It was the most expensive war, it was the costliest war in human lives, it had the weirdest national leaders at the helm at the time (a paraplegic Yank, a chainsmoking, paintbrush-brandishing MP, a mustachioed Russian lunatic and a crazy Austrian guy with a toothbrush moustache and half his sexual equipment hanging around beneath him)…but the Second World War also holds the record of being the war with the biggest ever seaborne invasion. No, not the Battle of Dunkirk…that was the biggest seaborne evacuation; but the Battle of Normandy, specifically, the naval landings on the beaches of France.

The Allied attempt to liberate northern France and to start the process of beating back the Germans and driving them out of lands which were not their own was codenamed “Operation Overlord”. However, the actual beach-landings were given the codename “Operation Neptune”. It was during Operation Neptune that all those famous photographs were taken…like this one:

Seaborne Invasions

In warfare, invasions by sea have always been the most difficult to pull off. Airborne invasions involve planes strafing and bombing the target-area and then sending in paratroopers. Land-invasions are done using infantry and tanks, possibly with air-support. In both instances, getting onto dry, solid ground is pretty easy. Either you’re already there…or you soon will be.

Seaborne invasions, however, have always been tricky. A soldier sloshing through the surf with his uniform, his rifle, his ammunition, his helmet, his kit, his boots and other necessities was liable to be bogged down in the soft, shifting sand beneath the waves. This makes him a sitting duck for any defending soldiers, who can stick out their rifles and shoot him. Added to this is the problem that to get the attacking soldiers near to the beach, you need small boats. Small boats that are fast, light and which can go right up to the sand without running aground. Prior to the Second World War…no such boats existed! From the time of Napoleon right up to WWI, warships were forced to use regular wooden ship’s rowboats to ferry their troops ashore. This was slow, dangerous and catastrophic. Because these boats couldn’t go right up onto the beach, soldiers had to jump over the sides of the boats and wade through water that could be up to their waists, to get to the sand! This wasted time and made the men easy targets for enemy soldiers on land.

Operations Covered in This Article

In my mind, and probably in the minds of thousands of others…It is a great mistake to call the invasion of Normandy a single battle or operation. It sure as hell was not. The Invasion of Normandy was a concerted effort by thousands of people doing dozens of tiny little things and a few big things to pull off the most audacious and ridiculous and fantastic beach-assault in history. Covered in this article will be the following ‘Operations’ that made up the various elements of the Normandy Invasion.

Operation Overlord – The Battle of Normandy.
Operation Neptune – The Storming of the Beaches (more famously known as “D-Day”)
Operation Mulberry – The creation of a floating harbour off the coast of France.
Operation Cobra – The breakout from the beachhead to commence the liberation of Europe and the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Specialised Invasion Equipment

Folks fighting the Second World War realised pretty quickly that if they intended to win the war by an invasion of Europe by sea, they would need a lot of specialised fighting equipment with which to do it. What kinds of mechanical curiosities did people whip up to put an axe to the axis back in the 1940s?

Higgins Boats

The Higgins boat…which is the more people-friendly name of the water-craft also known as the “LCVP” (Landing Craft: Vehicles & Personnel), was one of the most famous and vital inventions of the Second World War, without which, the large-scale naval invasions such as those in Italy and France, would not have been possible.

The Higgins Boat was invented by an American chap named Andrew Higgins. The problem at the time was that since conventional boats needed keels to slice through the water, they were not able to get right up onto the beach during naval assaults: The keel would dig into the sand and strand the boat out in the surf, unable to move inland any further. To combat this, Higgins created a flat-bottomed boat which he based on the boats then used in navigating swamps and marshes in the United States. Having a flat bottom meant that his craft could go right up onto the beach and not get bogged in the surf.

Although referred to as ‘Higgins boats’ in this article for reasons of simplicity, they went by a variety of names. One of them was the ‘LCVP’ (Landing Craft: Vehicles & Personnel)

The other feature of the Higgins boat was its famous ramp-front. Another problem of the time was getting soldiers out of their boats as quickly as possible. Because of their high sides, it was hard for soldiers to get out of regular row-boats quickly enough, and this meant that they could be killed easily by enemy gunfire. Having a boat with a ramp that dropped down meant that soldiers could run right off the boat, onto the beach and find cover. The ramp also allowed vehicles such as Jeeps, small, wheeled artillery pieces and small tanks, to be driven right off the boats and onto the beach.

Higgins was quick to see the necessity for his new invention. Production of them started in 1941! Higgins boats were not fast (12kt), not pretty and certainly not comfortable (with the flat bottom, the Higgins boat bellyflopped across the waves with all the grace of a seal), but it was important! The war would not have been won without it, and Normandy would’ve been a disaster.

D-D Tanks

Duplex Drive tanks (shortened to ‘DD Tanks’ or jokingly…Donald Duck tanks) were the Allies’ solution to getting tanks and the necessary firepower and speed that they brought with them…onto the beaches of Normandy as fast as possible.

DD tanks were invented in the early 1940s. The Allies knew that it would be asking too much if they kindly asked the Wehrmarcht if they might, pretty-please, park a few of their tanks on the shores of France for them to use when they came ashore and blasted through their defenses. Instead, they needed to find a way to get their own tanks to France. The problem was, to get tanks onto land, the Allies would need a harbour. But to get a harbour, they first had to capture it. And to capture it, they needed tanks, but to get tanks, they needed a harbour and…you get the idea.

To get tanks ashore without a harbour, the Allies decided to create a floating tank (hence the alternate name ‘Donald Duck tank’). The tanks floated thanks to inflatable screens which were placed around them, and were propelled thanks to rather weak (though effective) outboard motors. The inflatable and collapsable screens, used to give the tanks the necessary boyancy so that they could float ashore, were made of waterproofed canvas. The tanks were offloaded from warships and were then sailed towards the beaches. Once the tanks reached the beaches, the inflatable screens were deflated. They collasped around the sides of the tank, giving the tank-crews the ability to just drive ahead and blast the hell out of the enemy.

“Ducks”

Officially called the ‘DUKW’ (utility vehicle with all-wheel drive designed in 1942), the ‘Duck’ as it was affectionately called, was one of the most important machines invented for the Invasion of Normandy. Based off of an ordinary truck which had its body removed from its chassis to be replaced by a watertight, boat-shaped hull, the ‘Duck’ was an amphibious delivery vehicle, able to power itself through the water and drive out of the surf onto the beach. These floating pickup-trucks were essential to the Nornandy invasion in that they were able to ferry cargo from ships docked at sea, to land-forces fighting on the beaches and then go straight back out into the water again. Twenty-one thousand ‘Ducks’ were manufactured during the War.

Hobart’s Funnies

The Allies had been planning to charge into Normandy for years…and the Axis knew that the Allies were going to come charging in. The only thing was, the Axis didn’t know where the Allies would come ashore. Because of this, the Axis barricaded, reinforced, booby-trapped and built up every single square yard of sand which made up the French coastline, to impede the Allied advance. To break through the multiple layers of defences, from sea-mines to hedgehogs to barbed wire, machine-gun nests, defensive bunkers, sea-walls and barbed wire, the Allies knew that they needed tanks. But not just any kinds of tanks. They needed tanks that could do a variety of tasks – Tanks that could blow holes in stuff, tanks that could clear minefields, tanks that could cross trenches and ditches, tanks that could clear away the rubble of the stuff that other tanks blew up!

The number of tanks that were developed were phenomenal. And the Allies had to know how to operate every single one of them. The man responsible for gathering the armour and firepower, and whose duty it was to train the tank-crews who would use them, was Sir Percy Hobart. Hobart was a military engineer and an armoured-warfare expert, the perfect man to teach the Brits how to use their newest playthings. Because the tanks were just so weird, soldiers named the tanks after the man who taught them how to use them, and they became collectively known as “Hobart’s Funnies”.

The number of tanks that the British Army developed was phenomenal. Here’s a few of the more famous tanks and what they could do…

The Crocodile.

The Crocodile. The trailer behind the tank carried the 400gal of fuel that allowed this beast to breathe fire!

Awesome name, huh? The Crocodile was modified so that instead of a central, main gun (like what most tanks have), it had a massive, fire-belching flamethrower on the front! How cool is that!? Fed from a tank that held four hundred gallons of petrol, the Crocodile could shoot flames a hundred and twenty yards! Although somewhat inaccurate and hard to aim, the Crocodile scared the daylights out of the Krauts and was excellent at roasting the enemy alive inside the confined spaces of German machine-gun bunkers.

AVRE.

ARMOURED VEHICLE, ROYAL ENGINEERS. Not very interesting. Or is it? The AVRE, like all the other tanks, was modified for a specific purpose. This one fired huge mortar-rounds at anything that the Allies considered an impediment to their progress across Germany, namely roadblocks, buildings or bunkers. The AVRE fired massive, high-explosive shells from its main gun, capable of blowing the shit out of whatever it touched.

ARK.

Armoured Ramp Carrier. A special tank that carried a pair of ramps on its roof. It was designed to act as a bridge on wheels. If the army approached an obstacle such as a trench, the ARK would drive ahead, deploy its ramps and then park itself there and let other tanks drive over the top of it!

Crab

The crab…probably given that name because of the two arms that stuck out in front of it…was the British Army’s minesweeping and mine-clearing tank. It had two metal arms that stuck out in front of it with a long, metal cylinder between them. Attached to the cylinder was a series of chains. At the flip of a switch, the cylinder spun around and the chains whirled out in front, whipping up the ground as the tank drove ahead. The chains would strike and detonate any mines which were in the tank’s path, and provide a safe route for soldiers to follow behind.

German Beach-Defences

In the truest spirit of German efficiency, the Krauts were not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, wondering what the Yanks and the Limeys and the Frogs were getting up to. They knew something was going to happen. They knew that an invasion of France…ONE DAY…was going to be inevitable. To shore themselves up against this inevitablity, the Germans built an enormous collection of fortifications along the northern shores of Europe, stretching alongside the English Channel and up past the North Sea. Officially called the “Atlantic Wall”, this series of defences comprised of everything from powerful anti-tank mines, miles of barbed wire, huge pillboxes and machine-gun nests, anti-tank ditches, long-range artillery cannons (set several hundred yards back, which would fire down on the landing-beaches), mines on stakes that they drove into the sand, designed to go off if a landing-craft hit it, blowing the boat and its passengers to pieces and most famously of all…these things:

Those square-looking spikey things are synonymous with beach-warfare. They’re called Czech Hedgehogs (or simply ‘hedgehogs’) and they’re an anti-tank obstacle. Incredibly easy to make and nigh unshiftable. They’re three lengths of steel beam riveted or welded together in a rough cross-shape and then just scattered all over the beach. Cheap, simple and effective. The problem with them is that if you drove a tank into one…you couldn’t crush it, and because it had no actual base, you couldn’t topple it over and just shove it out of your way. To the troops storming the beaches of Normandy, Czech hedgehogs were a mix of frustration and lifesaver all in one. They might have been a pain in the ass for the tank-crews who couldn’t drive over them or shove them out of the way, but to the infantry they were lifesavers in disguise. Allied soldiers would hide behind them and use them for cover while they fired on German machine-gun nests with their submachine-guns and rifles. They were lucky that the hedgehogs were there, for there was precious little else on the beaches that would have given them sufficient cover from the powerful counterfire of the German MG-42 belt-fed machine-gun.

The Battle of Normandy

The Guiness Book of World Records, once a noble institution of fact and intelligence, now sadly degenerated into a compendium of useless information such as who created the world’s biggest ice-cream pyramid…says that the Battle of Normandy holds the record of being the biggest ever seaborne invasion. And it’s right. Take a look at these numbers:

Planes: 12,000.
Ships: 7,000.
Troops: 160,000.

All these men and machines took part in the initial assault on the beaches on the 6th of June, 1944. And they won! But not without a lot of problems, first.

The order of battle was pretty simple – Planes go overhead, drop off surprise-packages for the Germans, ships come, deploy tanks and men, tanks and men go ashore and blow the hell out of the Krauts, who are already too busy dealing with the surprise-parcels dropped off thanks to the RAF and the Army Air Corps. The battle started with parachute-troops being dropped behind enemy lines. Their jobs were to secure important locations such as villages, roads and airfields. They were to link up and create a barrier so that reinforcements couldn’t get to the beaches as quickly as they might. Bombers would fly over the beaches and perform saturation-bombing of the coastline. This was to knock out as many enemy bunkers as possible, but also to provide some nice hidey-holes for the Allied troops when they came ashore.

The coastline of Normandy was divided into six specific beaches, all codenamed. In order, they were…

Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, as seen on this map:

Once the airborne troops were dropped behind enemy lines, they went about their objectives, linking up and then spreading out in groups. They secured important roads, bridges and railroad lines. They also tried to disrupt enemy movements as much as possible, attacking German troops and sabotaging German artillery-positions, which were located further inland than other Allies could reach. By blowing up the German artillery-guns, the airborne units stopped shells being rained down on the beaches, giving their fellow fighters a chance at the enemy.

Not everything went perfectly, though. Omaha Beach especially, was a mess. The D-D tanks, deployed too far out in the ocean, sank before they could reach land. The aerial-bombardment had failed to knock the German machine-gun nests out of commission and the beach was as flat as a pancake when the soldiers arrived. With no shell-craters for them to take cover in, the Americans were sitting ducks for the Germans who machine-gunned them down in their hundreds. Omaha became known as “Bloody Omaha” after the war.

The Battle of Normandy started in the pre-dawn of the morning of the 6th of June, 1944. An allied armada, a naval and aerial taskforce the size of which the world had never seen before and which it has never seen again, charged towards the French coast after crossing the English Channel from a number of British seaports.

The objectives of the battle were to destroy German coastal defences, liberate France and establish a secure beach-head for the Allies so that extra troops and supplies could be driven and shipped onto the battlegrounds. The fighting, as depicted in films such as “The Longest Day” and “Saving Private Ryan” was fierce and prolonged. The Germans knew that the moment the Allies broke through their defences, they would come steamrolling in like the neighbours from hell, destroying everything in their path.

Once the Allies had destroyed the German defences and liberated some of the coastal villages, they were able to set up bases. Since no harbour (or at least, no harbour sufficient for warships) existed in Normandy, the Allies knew they would have to build one. Floating in huge pontoons, they were able to hastily construct a manmade breakwater and piers which led out deep enough into the English Channel for ships to dock and offload their cargos. Called “Operation Mulberry”, it was one of the most essential elements of the D-Day invasion. Without a port (even if it sounded like one you might buy from IKEA), the invasion would have ground to a halt. Once the beach-head was established, without a constant stream of supplies, men, ammunition, food, fuel and firearms, the invashion would have ground to a halt. All very imporant reasons for the creation of a floating harbours. With this vital entrance to Europe secured, the Allies could now push forward in their liberation of Europe. It was one of the most crucial battles of the Second World War. It meant that now, the Germans were fighting a war on two fronts (France and Russia) and this caused the German Army to split up its resources, meaning that the Allies would be able to beat them easier.

The Air-Battle for Normandy

Normandy was many things. It wasn’t just storming the beaches. It also wasn’t just an attack by ground-forces. It wasn’t just a naval assault. It was also a huge aerial pre-emptive strike by the Allies.

Knowing that they wouldn’t succeed at Normandy without dominance of the air, the Allies spent weeks in advance attacking German-occupied France using the combined power of the United States Army Air-Force and the Royal Air Force. Their objectives were to blow up bridges, destroy railway lines, attack aircraft factories and destroy every single airworthy flying-machine within attacking-distance of Normandy. They strafed and gunned and bombed airfields left, right and center, destroying hangars and airfields, runways and as many enemy planes as they could find. They also bombed the beaches that the landings were to take place on.

Raiding the beaches was an essential element of the air-assault on the north of France. Although the Allies knew that destroying the German machine-gun bunkers through carpet-bombing was going to be only marginally successful at best, bombing the beaches would have the advantage of giving their advancing ground-troops plenty of fox-holes in the sand in which to hide from enemy gunfire. Without this crucial attack on the beaches, the British, Canadian, American and Commonwealth troops storming the beaches would be sitting ducks for the Germans, who had mined, barricaded and wired every square inch of the Normandy coastline…at least, every square inch that wasn’t flat and smooth as a billiard table to serve as an unobstructed killing-field.

The End of the Battle

There are conflicting dates for the end of the Battle of Normandy and of Operation Overlord in general. The most accepted view is that it was the 25th of August, 1944, with the liberation of the French capital of Paris. After a battle that lasted six days, the Germans were finally overwhelmed by a mix of Free French forces, American infantry and French resistence fighters within the city and were forced to surrender. The fact that many of Paris’s historical buildings such as the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum, the Arc D’Triomphe and the Cathedral of Notre Dame still survive today, is due wholly to the occupying Nazi governor’s decision to ignore Hitler’s famous command that Paris be razed to the ground to try and destroy Allied morale.

16/05/2011 by Scheong

X Marks the Spot: Being a Brief & Concise Examination of the Popular Views of the Golden Age of Piracy

Ah, pirates. We love pirates! I love pirates! Don’t you love pirates? We all love pirates!

But like me…you probably don’t know a damn thing about them. So that’s what this article is for. It’s a look into what pirates were and when they existed. It’s an examination of the times in which they lived, how they lived, what they did and how they did it…during the Golden Age of Piracy.

What do we ‘know’ about pirates?

Pirates have existed for centuries, even the 21st century, what with Somalian pirates being in the news of late, attacking ships and holding their captains and crews hostage and with the navys of the world’s superpowers trying to put a stop to their felonious, maritime activities. But when most people think of pirates, we think of the classic pirate – Peg-leg, eyepatch, hook-hand, bandana, boots, buckles, belts, striped shirt, waistcoat, neckerchief, pistol and cutlass. We think that pirates sailed around attacking ships, killing their crews or stealing them of their cargoes, which they would later bury on tropical island paradises, going back there later with maps to dig up their hordes of booty and then sail off into retirement.

But how much of this is true? What were classic pirates really like? A lot of what we think of pirates comes from popular fiction, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” and “The Pirates of the Carribean” or “Hook” and the stories of Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie. We think that pirates drank rum and that they spoke a strange language full of phrases that nobody else would understand, like “Pieces of Eight” and “Avast” and “walking the plank”. They say that all myth has a basis in fact. But which facts and how many of these ‘facts’ are actually real?

Pirating Times

The ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ ran, with stops and starts, from about 1620 until about 1780, a period of roughly a hundred and sixty years. Pirates came from all countries, including Great Britain, Colonial America, France and Spain. During this era, which was occasionally interrupted by wars, outbreaks of disease or fantastic natural disasters, pirates sailed around attacking ships, stealing their cargo and either killing the crews and sinking their ships or marooning them on an island and sailing off their newer, much better ship (the one with central heating and surround-sound home-theater).

What kind of people were Pirates?

In many cases, pirates were actually privateers. A privateer was a bit like a ‘government pirate’. You were given a letter of authority (officially, a “Letter of Marque”) that said you could hunt down, attack, capture or sink any ships bearing an enemy flag. Privateers were often spawn during warfare as an easy way to deprive the enemy of its weapons, foodstuffs, ammunition and other essential wartime supplies. But what happened when the war ended? Privateers were out of a job! So the natural thing to do was to put your seafaring skills to good use and turn into the oceangoing version of a highway robber, sticking up ships on the open seas and stealing their treasures. In the days before government social security, this was pretty much the only way a sailor out of work could ensure his own ‘social security’. Like most desperate criminals, pirates had a lot to gain and nothing to lose and plenty of time to do one and not the other.

As I mentioned earlier, pirates came from all over what was then the known world, although the majority of pirates (about one third, according to my research) were English, probably not surprising when you consider that the Royal Navy was the most powerful in the world at the time. Indeed, one of the main reasons why people became pirates was to escape the harsh realities of naval life. You didn’t have to be flogged, you could get better food and you could sail to where-ever it was you wished to go.

Common Pirate Stereotypes

Pirates have been so swamped in literary and filmic fantasy that it’s sometimes hard to determine fact from fiction with piracy. So how many of the famous aspects of piracy are actually true?

The Jolly Roger is the classic pirate flag. A black rectangle with a skull and a pair of bones in a diagonal ‘St. Andrews’-style cross. It’s believed that this flag was probably created in the late 17th century, but it was by no means the only pirate flag that existed. Variations of black flags with skulls, skeletons or swords existed throughout the Golden Age of Piracy and each pirate ship and captain had his own particular design. In general, a black pirate flag (with or without its morbid artwork) was used as a sign to the enemy that the crew onboard would fight to the death and were beholden to no laws other than their own.

Peglegs and hook-hands really were part of pirate folklore. Sea-battles were fierce and dangerous affairs and it wasn’t uncommon for pirates to lose limbs or to have them so badly injured that they’d require them to be amputated later. Most pirate ships had absolutely no professional medical help onboard at all, except for the ship’s cook (the only person around with any experience with knives). The ship’s cook would perform the amputation, after which the bloody stump would be bandaged and cauterised using blackpowder. Pouring gunpowder on a bleeding stump and lighting it was a quick and dirty way to stop bleeding. The intense heat from the burning powder would sear the wound shut and prevent continued bleeding and eventual infection. Afterwards, a prosthetic limb such as a hook-hand or a peg-leg would be fashioned out of whatever spare wood, metal and leather (to act as a securing strap) that the pirates could lay their hands on.

Eyepatches were used, both for covering an eye-socket when someone lost an eye in a fight, or, as was actually more common, to preserve sight when moving around the ship. It was often dark inside ships and very bright outside. Due to the extreme contrast between the different light-levels, wearing an eyepatch was a way of ensuring that a pirate’s eyes could adapt quickly between extreme brightness and extremely low light.

“Pieces of Eight” refers to money. Traditionally, prize-money at sea was divided up into eighths and shared out among the crew accordingly. ‘Pieces of Eight’ were also Spanish dollars, Spanish gold being a popular target of English pirates during the 17th century.

Parrots are as commonly associated with pirates as dogs are with the blind. Pirates travelled all over the world so it is possible that they picked up parrots and kept them as pets during their travels.

Tropical Locations are always associated with pirates. And you can hardly blame them. After all that pirating, you would want to relax in a tropical island paradise for a few years. And the Johnny Depp film franchise would have us believe that pirates loved hanging out under the Carribbean sun when they weren’t doing anything else. But is this true? Probably yes. Pirates preyed on ships sailing around the equatorial Atlantic Ocean, sailing along the “Triangle of Trade”. Ships sailed from England to Africa to pick up slaves (stop one), then across to the southern reaches of North America (stop two) to drop off slaves, before provisioning their ships, picking up spices and cloth and other goodies, like the latest bootleg DVDs, and then sailing back to England (stop three). Hanging around in waters like these, it’s not hard to see why pirates are associated with tropical locales such as the Carribbean.

Pirates love Drinking Rum! It’s well-known that pirates (and maritime types in general) loved drinking rum and grog! Is this true? The answer is probably yes. Rum, an alcoholic beverage created from molasses, has been distilled since the mid 1600s, right around when pirates were rocking the waves. It was produced in sugar-growing areas of the world such as the southern areas of North America and the Carribbean, where pirates were known to hang out.

Rum started being given to British seamen in 1655, replacing their previous tipple, brandy, so successfully that by the 1740s, rum had to be watered down, creating the slightly less alcoholic beverage…grog. The introduction of rum was directly linked to the British colonisation of Jamaica. Sailors took such a liking to rum that when they turned into pirates, they kept rum around them at all times. Attacking ships is thirsty work, after all.

Buried Treasure! Everyone knows that pirates buried their treasure! They parked off of a tropical island, dug a hole, chucked in their gold, buried it, drew a map to its location and then sailed off, coming back years later when it became a necessity to access their little nest-egg. But is this true?

“Treasure Island” as drawn by Robert Louis Stevenson

Sorry folks. No it isn’t. History (and reliable records) says that only ONE pirate…Captain Kidd (Capt. William Kidd; 1645-1701) ever buried any treasure at all (the location is believed to be Long Island, New York). But this was hardly a widespread practice, so for all intents and purposes, no, pirates did not bury their treasure, and as Indiana Jones said: “X never, ever marks the spot”.

Pirates were all ruthless cutthroats and indeed they were. At least, to other seafarers. In actuality though, pirates were a pretty disciplined bunch. Surprising, huh? Below, you will see a partial list of rules and regulations from various Pirating Codes that existed throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

Walking the Plank was a pirate’s favourite way of getting rid of troublesome people. Again, not nearly as common as we’d like to think. Although instances of walking the plank have been recorded throughout history, it appears that it wasn’t a widespread practice and was rarely used by pirates. It was most likely glamorised by writers and Hollywood.

There was such thing as a Pirates’ Code In “Pirates of the Carribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl”, we are told that there is a ‘Brethren Code’. Did such a code ever exist? Research suggests that a code (or more likely, several codes) did exist, and that these codes were the rules that pirates were obliged to follow. Sadly, no original written documents of such codes from the 1600s survive, but copies stated that among other things…

Pirates of the Carribbean

What is Port Royal?

Port Royal was a city located in British Jamaica. It was built and colonised during the second half of the 1600s. It was a safe haven for pirates during this time and pirates were even called upon by the Port’s governor to help defend the city in the case of Spanish or French naval attacks. In its time, Port Royal was famous for whoring, boozing, drunken brawls and alcoholism…charming place. There was said to be a public house, tavern, bar or other less-than-reputable drinking-establishment for every ten people that lived in Port Royal. When you consider that Port Royal was once home to about 6,500 people, that’s a hell of a lot of drinking. In 1687, Port Royal tried to clean up its act and passsed Anti-Piracy laws. Dozens of pirates were arrested and hanged for their crimes. The Port was destroyed in 1692 by a powerful earthquake, which many believed was God’s punishment for all the prostitution, drinking, gambling and vice that existed in the city. Port Royal barely exists as a city today. It was destroyed again by earthquake in January of 1907 and the city has struggled ever since.

Where is Tortuga?

Ilsa Tortuga, the Island of Turtles, is located off of the coast of Haiti, northeast of the Jamaican city of Port Royal. Colonised in 1625, it was a notorious pirate hangout during the 17th century. French and English pirates existed in an uneasy harmony here for several years. It was attacked in 1654 by the Spanish and by 1670, pirating connections with Tortuga were in serious decline. Pirates who used Tortuga as a home-base began to turn to legitimate work in the years that followed since piracy wasn’t exactly bringing in the gold anymore.

Were Pirates Really Marooned on Desert Islands?

Yes indeed they were. As mentioned above (although not in great detail), marooning a pirate on a desert island was a genuine pirate punishment of the 17th century. The offending party was lowered on a ship’s boat, rowed ashore and then the rest of the pirates rowed back to the ship and sailed off. The marooned party was given a bottle of water (or rum; whichever was more readily available), a flintlock pistol, a round of pistol-shot and a charge of blackpowder. The decision was simple, really. You could drink the water and ration it out and see how long you survived until you starved to death…Or you could load the pistol and commit suicide and have it all over in a heartbeat.

What is the ‘Black Spot’?

Jack Sparrow is given the Black Spot in one of the PotC movies. In the film, Jack Sparrow has the mark on the palm of his hand, but in real life, the Black Spot was either a black, filled-in circle on a sheet of paper, or the Ace of Spades out of a deck of cards. The Black Spot was given to someone suspected of being a government informer or a traitor to his pirate brethren.

Some Famous Pirates

So, who are some famous pirates that we know of? Captain Jack Sparrow? Long John Silver? Captain Hook? Captain Feathersword!? Pffft. Here’s some real pirates for yah…

Blackbeard!

Real Name: Edward Teach.
Born: Ca. 1680, England.
Died: 22nd Nov., 1718, of twenty sword-wounds and five bullet-wounds sustained in battle.

Notes:

– Blackbeard is believed to have had over a dozen wives!
– Blackbeard blockaded the city of Charles Town (Charleston) South Carolina and threatened to open fire on it with his ships and kill hostages (prominent city officials) unless his ransom (a chest of medical supplies) was met. The supplies were produced and Blackbeard set sail without firing a single shot.
– Always ready for action, Blackbeard carried no less than three braces of pistols on him during battles (‘brace’ is an old term for a pair. So in all…six pistols).

Captain Kidd

Real Name: William Kidd.
Born: 1645.
Died: 23rd May, 1701.

Notes:

– One of the few pirates who actually buried treasure.
– Was once a privateer for the English government.
– Tried to bribe his way out of the charge of piracy.
– Eventually arrested, brought back to England from Colonial America.
– He was found guilty of five counts of piracy and one count of murder. He was hanged in London.

Black Sam

Real Name: Samuel Bellamy.
Born: 23rd February, 1689.
Died: 27th April, 1717.

Notes:

– Called ‘The Prince of Pirates’ for showing mercy to prisoners.
– Ammassed one of the greatest pirate fortunes ever.
– His flagship, the Whydah Gally sank off of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It was rediscovered in 1984.

The End of Piracy

To be fair…piracy never really ended. The classic, romantic, Hollywood swashbuckling pirate is still alive…in classic, romantic Hollywood films. And piracy is still a big threat today in the waters around the African continent. But classic piracy of the kind we associate with ‘Treasure Island’ did eventually peter out as the 18th century progressed. In 1717, King George I of England issued an amnesty to all pirates, basically saying that all their crimes would be absolved, on the condition that they stopped being pirates. Some pirates were glad to give up the life and took advantage of His Majesty’s mercy. Others stuck their tongues out at the king and went right on pirating.

Throughout History

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