29/04/2011 by Scheong

The Biggest Maritime Disaster Ever: The M.V. Wilhelm Gustloff

Disasters at sea will always be famous. The R.M.S. Lusitania, the R.M.S. Titanic, the H.M.H.S Britannic and the Oceanos, to name but a few. And they’re all famous for different reasons – War, luxury, mischance, cowardice and bravery…and yet, none of these is the biggest maritime disaster of all. No, not even the Titanic, which this year commemorates the 99th anniversary of its sinking.

This unfortunate honour: The biggest maritime disaster in the world to date, goes to the ill-fated German ocean-liner, the M.V. Wilhelm Gustloff.

What was the Wilhelm Gustloff?

The M.V. (motor vessel) Wilhelm Gustloff was built between 1936 and 1938. Originally, she was a cruise-ship and was named for the asassinated leader of the Nazi Party in Switzerland, who was killed just months before construction was due to begin. The Gustloff was launched on the fifth of May, 1937 in Hamburg, Germany.

Photograph of the Gustloff being launched

The Gustloff had been envisioned as one of the most luxurious cruise-ships of the day. She was to have large communal halls and open decks so that passengers could make optimum use of the space offered by the ship. As near as was possible, her cabins were all to be the same size. This was the same for both passengers and crew, to create a feeling of equality onboard ship…although only the passenger cabins would be permitted to have oceanfront views. To continue the feeling of equality, there would only be one class onboard ship – the cruise-class.

The Wilhelm Gustloff was 684ft long (nearly a full 200ft shorter than the Titanic), she weighed 26,000GRT (Gross Registered Tons), a little more than half of the Titanic and she carried 417 crew and 1,460 passengers, making for a total complement of 1,877. By comparison, the Titanic could take over three thousand passengers and crew. She had eight decks, a top speed of fifteen knots (18mph) thanks to two propellers and engines capable of producing 9,500hp. She had twenty two lifeboats and twelve transverse bulkheads creating thirteen watertight compartments

With all these characteristics, Hitler hoped that the Wilhelm Gustloff would be a floating pleasure-ship, taking Germans all around Europe. She would be comfortable, open and safe to travel on and would be a symbol of German superiority and ingenuity. She was designed to be a cruise-ship for the masses, for ordinary German working men and women, a sign that the Fuhreur and the Reich cared about the ordinary, hardworking German citizen. To the German worker, the Gustloff was to be the ultimate prize and reward as a holiday for all his hard work. But sadly, it was not to be.

In the company of the captain, Hitler (extreme left) tours the recently-completed Wilhelm Gustloff in 1938

Wilhelm Gustloff – Hospital Ship

Whatever Hitler’s plans were for the Wilhelm Gustloff, they barely reached fruition, if indeed they ever did. Barely a year after the ship’s maiden voyage on the Thursday of the 24th of March, 1938, Germany would be plunged into the hell of the Second World War and all thoughts of the Wilhelm Gustloff being the People’s Cruise-Ship were smashed to pieces.

Once the pride of the German KdF (Kraft Durch Freude, “Strength through Joy”) shipping fleet, after several successful cruises throughout 1938 and early 1939, the Wilhelm Gustloff was turned over to the German navy, the Kriegsmarine in September 1939 with the outbreak of World War Two.

In the German Navy, the Wilhelm Gustloff was turned into a hospital ship, a role which she played from September 1939 until November of 1940. After that, she became a floating barracks for German U-boat crews.

The Wilhelm Gustloff as a hospital ship off the coast of Oslo, Norway; 1940

Operation Hannibal and the Last Voyage

For four years, between 1941-1945, the Gustloff had remained at anchor. During this time, it was used mostly to house sailors and submariners, but by 1944 and the Invasion of Normandy in June of that year, the War started going bad for Germany, especially on the Eastern Front. Operation Barbarossa, the attempt by Hitler to invade the Soviet Union, was a complete disaster and now the Russians wanted revenge. By January 1945, the German army was fighting off Italy, Russia, England, America, Commonwealth troops, Free French fighters and resistence-fighters on almost every front imaginable and it was rapidly losing the war.

As the Russian army pushed westward across Eastern Europe towards Poland, Operation Hannibal was executed.

Operation Hannibal was nothing less than the biggest seaborne evacuation in military history. It even eclipsed the famous Dunkirk Evacuation when the “little ships” were used to evacuate Allied soldiers from the beaches of France in 1940. In total, Operation Hannibal was going to try and evacuate about one and a quarter to two million people in roughly a thousand ships over the course of fifteen weeks.

One of those ships, was the M.V. Wilhelm Gustloff.

On the 22nd of January, 1945, the Wilhelm Gustloff is given the order to prepare to take on thousands of escaping German refugees. Many are women, children and wounded soldiers. German civilians are terrified of what retributions the Russians might unleash as they sweep westwards and many want to escape back to Germany as fast as possible. The Wilhelm Gustloff is at anchor in the port city of Gdynia, German-Occuped Poland. The crew are worried. Apart from the fact that they have to house so many thousands of people, they are worried about the mechanical strain; the Gustloff’s engines have been cold for the past four years while it was in harbour, and there is no time to run the necessary maintenance and safety-checks.

On the 28th of January, the Gustloff’s crew receive the order to prepare for evacuation. Thousands of refugees, mostly sailors, nurses, civilians and wounded soldiers file onboard, each person bearing a permit of travel that allows them refugee status and permission to board the Gustloff.

Gustloff’s last voyage took place on the 30th of January, 1945. On this day, the ship is ordered to raise anchor and steam westwards towards the German city of Kiel. The official passenger manifest lists about 3,000 people onboard (the Gustloff is rated to carry only 1,800 passengers and crew), but even this is not even close. In the panic of evacuations, thousands of people who aren’t supposed to be there, force their way onboard the already dangerously overcrowded ship. Even as the Gustloff leaves the harbour, people are offloaded onto the ship from harbour-tugs which pull up alongside while their passengers climb on, using the ship’s boarding-stairs. In total, the Gustloff is carrying about ten and a half thousand people.

January 30th, 1945. The Gustloff leaves Poland. This is the last photograph ever taken of the ship

Onboard the Gustloff, things are far from easy. The ship is crammed so far beyond capacity that even with extra safety-equipment onboard, there is only enough lifeboats, flotation-vests and life-rings for less than half the ship’s full complement of passengers and crew. The passenger-quarters are so full that any space at all is fair-game as a sleeping-area during the voyage back to Germany.

On the bridge, the Gustloff is in the combined command of four captains, three civilian captains and one military one. They argue constantly on the best precautions to take. Do they turn off the ship’s lights to prevent detection? Do they stay near the coast where Soviet submarines will find it harder to patrol? Do they go into deeper water away from the shoreline where lights from cities will certainly outline the shape of the ship? Do they go straight ahead to make the most of what short time they have, or do they steer a conventional wartime zig-zag course to try and throw off enemy submarines who might try and torpedo them?

The only thing that the captains seemed to agree on was that their escort was wholly inadequate. All they had was one torpedo-boat, the Lowe, to protect them from the formidable force of the Russians and anything that they could throw against them. The ship was a sitting duck.

The Lowe, originally a torpedo-boat in the Royal Norwegian Navy. It was captured by the Germans in 1940 and was returned to the Norwegians in 1945 at the end of the War

The Sinking

With such disagreements over defensive actions and with such a useless escort-vessel, the Wilhelm Gustloff was easy pickings for the Russian submariners who hunted down fleeing German shipping. The submarine that’s after the Gustloff is the S-13, under the command of Capt. Alexander Marinesko.

Just before 8:00pm on the 30th of January, the S-13 spots the Wilhelm Gustloff. It’s in deep water with all its lights on, as a warning to other shipping, but to the crew of the Russian submarine, it’s a big, fat target. For a whole hour, Capt. Marinesko orders that no actions be taken. The Wilhelm Gustloff is a big prize and the Russians must be patient, lining up the perfect shot before they try and take the ship down.

Eventually, shortly after 9:00pm, Capt. Marinesko gives the order to fire. The S-13 lets loose three of a possible four torpodoes into the water. The fourth torpedo misfires and jams in its torpedo-tube. Quick thinking on the part of the S-13’s crew prevents the malfunctioning torpedo from exploding and destroying the submarine. The captain has no idea what his target is because it’s so dark outside. All he knows is that it’s a big German ocean-liner with all its lights on.

At 9:16pm, disaster strikes.

The first torpedo slams into the Wilhelm Gustloff, forward of the bridge, blowing a hole in her port bow. The second torpedo strikes the ship further back, below the ship’s swimming-pool. The third torpedo hits the vessel amidships, destroying the engine-rooms.

To prevent the ship from sinking, the captains order all watertight doors to be closed at once. This unwittingly drowns many of the ship’s crew who would have been essential in manning lifeboats and organising evacuations. The second torpedo kills hundreds of the Women’s Naval Auxilliary who have used the empty ship’s swimming-pool as a sleeping-area. The third torpedo arguably creates the most damage of all.

By striking the ship’s engine-room, the third torpedo simultaneously disables the ship and isolates it from the outside world. With the engines crippled, the Wilhelm Gustloff is unable to move, but even more unfortunately, the damaged engines will no longer power the ship’s generators – all electrical power, from lights to telephones and even the ship’s wireless radio, suddenly lose power, plunging everything into darkness. If not for the ship’s emergency generator (for the wireless-room only), the Gustloff would have sunk without anyone knowing what had ever happened to it.

Although the wireless-radio is still operational (if just barely), its transmission range is only two kilometers. Within that radius, only the Gustloff’s escort-vessel, the Lowe, picks up the ship’s desperate S.O.S message. It immediately steams towards the ship.

Onboard the Gustloff, panic reigns supreme.

Whatever people are not immediately killed or drowned in the opening minutes of the attack are now desperate to get off the ship. There are barely enough lifejackets to go around and certainly not enough lifeboats. The three huge holes in the ship’s hull causes a dangerous list to Port and the ice on the ship’s boat-deck sends many people sliding into the freezing January waters. Whatever lifeboats there are, become next to useless because they are frozen to their davits by the freezing temperatures. Any crew who might be able to free them and lower them safely are probably dead already, trapped inside the ship’s hull.

In the chaos, only one lifeboat is lowered successfully. Most people just jump or slide into the water where lifebelts provide little protection against the freezing water. People jumping into the water wearing one of the few life-vests that are available are susceptable to broken necks. As their bodies hit the water and sink, their chins hit the floating vest, whipping their heads back and causing spinal injuries. What few lifeboats are lowered are done so incorrectly or haphazardly, causing them to break free from the ship and crash into the water. At least one lifeboat is smashed to pieces when an anti-aircraft gun on the boat-deck breaks loose as the Gustloff continues a steady list to port.

The Gustloff’s woefully underpowered wireless set only manages to raise the Lowe, the Gustloff’s one and only escort-vessel, which is able to reach the stricken cruise-ship’s side within fifteen minutes. She manages to rescue 472 people in the water and in lifeboats. The Gustloff continues to sink. The severe list to port means that it becomes impossible for people to get out of the ship. Stairways and corridors are packed with panicking passengers who can’t find their way up to the boat deck due to the lack of lights and the inability to climb the stairs due to the tilting of the ship. Soon, it is a case of “Every man for himself” as people take their lives in their hands and fight to find any way off the ship and on to safety. Soldiers and sailors shoot their own families and then commit suicide rather than freeze to death in the water. Firearms are also used by the ship’s officers to try and maintain order on the boat deck, but in a scenario where even the “Birkenhead Drill” (more famously known as “Women and Children First”) is being ignored by everyone, they do little more than add more panic to the already frantic situation unfolding all around them.

In less than forty-five minutes, the Gustloff had been struck by three torpedoes, it had listed to port, capsized and finally, vanished beneath the waves.

In total, nine ships and boats of varying sizes rush to the Gustloff’s aid. Between them, they save a total of 1,252 people. The last person to be rescued was a baby which was found alive in one of the Gustloff’s lifeboats, seven hours after the ship went down. Of approximately 10,500 people onboard the Gustloff, anywhere from 9,200 to 9,500 people (the exact figure is unknown because no official record exists of how many people were really onboard) either drowned inside the Gustloff when it went down, or froze to death in the water trying to escape. It remains to this day, the biggest loss of life at sea from a single disaster.

The Aftermath of the Sinking

Despite the appalling loss of life, the Wilhelm Gustloff is probably the most forgettable and unknown maritime disaster in the world. The reasons for this are numerous and some of them are more obvious than others.

– The Wilhelm Gustloff sunk during the dying months of the Second World War. There was little interest in the popular news press about anything that wasn’t directly related to an eventual Allied victory in Europe.
– The Gustloff was an ‘enemy ship’ carrying ‘enemy soldiers’ and civillians. It wasn’t in the best interests of the Allies to take notice, or care.
– Dozens of ships were being sunk every day during the War. One more barely made a difference.
– The German government, already aware that their country would lose the war, suppressed the news, fearful of what it would do to already-shattered German morale.
– The Gustloff carried no famous celebrities, unlike the Titanic, which carried nearly all the movers-and-shakers, socialites and big businessmen of the Edwardian era.

Capt. Alexander Marinesko, the Soviet submarine-commander who torpedoed the Gustloff was shunned by almost everyone, even in Russia! Within years of his successful action against the Gustloff, Marinesko had been…

– Discharged from the Soviet Navy.
– Arrested and sent to Siberia for three years’ hard labour.
– Diagnosed with cancer.
– Reinstated with his title of captain.
– Given a military pension.
– Given a ceremony honouring his actions during the Second World War.

Just three weeks after these last three incidents, Marinesko died, in October of 1963. He was fifty years old.

Today, the Wilhelm Gustloff is a protected war-grave. It lies in 44 meters of water, off the northwest coast of Poland.

27/03/2011 by Scheong

Taking the Waters: The History of the Modern Soft-Drink

Soft drinks are something we take for granted today. Everything from sparkling mineral-water, soda-water, tonic-water, lemonade, Sprite, 7-Up, Fanta, Solo, Irn Bru and the most famous soft-drink of all…Coca Cola.

But where did all this start? How did mankind one day discover that cold liquids would suddenly taste amazing and refreshing if they were merely carbonated? When were the first soft-drinks created and what did they originate as? How did they develop from curiosities and cures, to one of our most beloved and addictive beverages today?

This article tracks the development of the modern soft-drink from its birth as a medicine in the 18th century, to its mass consumption by its worldwide fizzy fandom in the 21st.

The Birth of Hydrotherapy

In the 18th and 19th centuries, medicine was crude. It was a mix of folklore, misguided science and age-old superstitions which on the whole…did nothing. Medical theory was advancing in this time, but cures for disease were few and far between and were of wildly varying effectiveness. People who suffered from anything from asthma to stomach-pains to muscle-pains would take a whole range of weird and scary potions, pills and concoctions to try and alleviate their discomfort and pain. However, the medicines prescribed by pharmacists and doctors were often unpleasant, either to look at, or to taste…in many cases, both!

It was in an effort to find cleaner, more comfortable ways to medicate the body that hydrotherapy was developed.

Hydrotherapy, or ‘water-therapy’, is the use of naturally mineralised waters, to cure various complaints. Mostly, it was used for muscle and joint pains. In cities such as Bath in England, it became fashionable to visit large public baths and springs which were filled with natural mineral-water to soothe joint-pains. This activity was known as ‘taking the waters’, from which the title of this article is derived.

The Rise of Medicinal Water

As hydrotherapy progressed, bathhouses and spa-retreats started popping up. Combined with a good diet and regular exercise, people began to recognise the benefits of water. Immersing oneself in a bath of cold water had the effect of increasing the heartrate, stimulating muscles and relieving joint-pain. Mineralised water was considered so beneficial that people began drinking it, as well as bathing in it. As early as 1661, the natural mineral-water available in the city of Bath was being bottled and sold for its ‘healthful benefits’.

However, there was some truth to mineralised and medicated water. And we should like to hope so. For without it, modern soft-drinks would not exist.

The first of these new waters was ‘soda water’.

Also called sparkling water or carbonated water, soda-water was created in the mid 18th century by a man named Joseph Priestly. In an experiment conducted in 1767, Priestly held a bowl of water above a vat of fermenting beer. The carbon dioxide released from the beer was impregnated into the water. Priestly called this vapour ‘fixed air’, and wrote about his experiements. He soon discovered that cold water impregnated with carbon dioxide had a pleasant, fizzy and sweet taste, and so experimented with finding a way to reproduce this effect. By dripping oil of vitriol (an old name for sulphuric acid) onto chalk, he could create carbon dioxide gas. By forcing this gas into water, he could create the world’s first soft-drink…

…soda water.

Although Priestly invented soda-water, the world’s first soft-drink, and recognised that it tasted wonderful, that was more or less all he did. It would take another man to put a marketing angle on Priestly’s invention and introduce it to the world. That man was an 18th century German watchmaker and scientist. A man named Johann…Jacob…Schweppe! And so…the world’s first soft-drink manufacturer, Schweppes, was founded in 1783.

The next step up from plain soda-water was a step away from commercial beverage-manufacturing, and a return to mankind’s original experiments with mineralised waters…to find cures for disease. Their first major breakthrough came in the mid 19th century with the invention of…

Tonic-water.

The word ‘tonic’, although rarely used today, still has medicinal connotations. And well it might, for that was precisely what it was meant to do. Tonic-water was invented when chemists put a small amount of quinine-powder into carbonated water. As quinine is very potent, only a small amount of it was added to a relatively large amount of water (only a few grains to each bottle), but the effect was amazing.

Apart from giving the water a distinct and slightly bitter taste…that tonic-water still has today…the water, thus treated with quinine, was now very effective in combating one of the most feared diseases that ravaged the African continent (and other tropical areas) during the 19th century – Malaria. It was for this reason that this quinine-infused water became known as ‘tonic-water’, because it was quite literally a ‘tonic’ (medicine) for malaria.

Tonic-water is relatively easy to make. You add quinine-powder, citric acid and baking-soda to a bottle of water. You seal the bottle tightly and invert it to mix the powders and dilute them in the water. The quinine is diluted with the water while the baking-soda reacts with the citric acid to let off carbon-dioxide gas. The gas, sealed inside the bottle, carbonates the water, thus creating carbonated tonic-water. Although a relatively easy process, the somewhat trial-and-error nature of making carbonated water this way was that the pressure of the gas could vary according to the quantities of baking-soda to water. If the pressure was too high, the bottle could explode in your hands!

One risk of bottling soda-water was that the corks used to seal the bottles could dry out and shrink, compromising the seal (and turning the cork into a dangerous missile if the pressure in the bottle managed to shoot it out). Some soda-water bottles were deliberately designed so that they couldn’t stand up straight. That way, the soda-water kept the cork damp and the swollen cork would keep the bottle tightly sealed.

Citrus Drinks

The next step up from creating cold, fizzy water was…creating cold fizzy water with flavour! With methods for safely and effectively manufacturing carbonated water now in place, the 18th and 19th century saw the rise of our first flavoured soft-drinks. The most famous of these was…lemonade!

Lemonade is created in several ways. Some use carbonated water, some use still water. In recipes calling for still water, baking soda was used to carbonate the water and lemon-juice and sugar was used to give it that sweet and sour lemony-taste that we all recognise today. Other fruits such as oranges and limes were also used to give plain carbonated water a different and more interesting taste.

The Most Famous of All: Coca Cola

Although famous today for being sickeningly sweet, conspicuously browny-red and for causing everything from pimples to dental problems to obesity and for being used for everything other than drinking, from cleaning toilets to removing blood…Coca Cola was actually invented as a medicine!

Coca-cola, or ‘Coke’ was invented in the state of Georgia in the United States in 1886. It was originally an alcoholic beverage called ‘Pemberton’s French Wine Cola’ and was created by a chemist named…John Pemberton.

Coca-Cola changed from its alcoholic form to its non-alcoholic form in the very year it was invented. In 1886, the temperance movement was beginning to gather steam and prohibition came to Georgia. Unable to sell alcoholic beverages, Pemberton instead marketed his new wonder-beverage as a medicine. Among other things, Coca-Cola was designed to cure headaches, impotence and drug-addictions!…An interesting claim when you consider that the drink famously gets is name ‘Coca-Cola’ because one of the main ingredients was…cocaine!

Mmmm…Healthy!

Originally sold over-the-counter by the glass, Coca-Cola was sold in bottles starting in 1894. Cocaine was removed from the drink’s recipe in 1903, but nevertheless, the name ‘Coca-Cola’ remained.

Drinks for a New Century

From their birth in the 18th century to their acceptance as a refreshing drink in the 20th century, soft-drinks underwent many changes. By the early 1900s, soft-drinks really began to rise in popularity. Temperence movements around the world meant that people, unable to buy alcohol, started drinking soft-drinks instead. Soda-fountains, manned by the ‘soda-jerk’ (so called because of the jerking-action used to operate the levers which carbonated the drinks with gas and which dispensed the aerated beverages) became increasingly popular. Soft-drinks were cheap, refreshing, delicious and easy to buy. A bottle of Coca-Cola cost about five cents in the early 20th century.

But why are soft-drinks called ‘soft’ drinks? This name was given to them to differentiate them from ‘hard’ drinks, meaning alcoholic beverages, as opposed to ‘soft drinks’, those which were non-alcoholic.

Soon, new flavours and brands of soft-drinks began to emerge, both on shelves and under soda-fountain counters all around the world. ‘Pepsi’ was first established in 1898, ‘7Up’ was created in 1929. ‘Fanta’ was invented during the Second World War in 1941. ‘Sprite’ and ‘Sunkist’ showed up in the 1960s and 70s. In keeping with soft-drink’s ‘medicinal origins’, ‘Pepsi’ (named for the pepsin enzyme which it contained) was supposed to aid the digestion of those who drank it. Of course, like Coca-Cola it didn’t actually do this, but Caleb Bradman, the man who invented Pepsi, liked to think that it did.

In the 21st century, soft-drinks continue to be enjoyed by millions of people all over the world, every single day. From its beginnings as a health-drink and tonic through its evolution as a healthy and tasty beverage, to a refreshing and invigorating drink to everyone’s favourite fizzy thirst-quencher, soft-drinks have remained in the public eye for the best part of nearly three centuries.

23/02/2011 by Scheong

Bringing out the Dead: The Life of a Body-Snatcher

After I found a book on this subject at one of the local junk-shops, I thought that an article on the crime of body-snatching would make a fascinating little bit of morbid reading. It’s one of those old-fashioned crimes that we often read about in history books, like witchcraft or poisoning wells or being transported for stealing a loaf of bread. Body-snatching is one of those crimes and like all crimes, it makes people ask the question ‘Why?’ Why was it done? Why was it necessary? Why would you want to do it and who were the people who that committed crimes like this?

What Is Body-Snatching?

Body-snatching is the crime of disinterring a corpse. Or in layman’s speech…digging up dead bodies. Ain’t that cuddly? In the form that most people would understand it, body-snatching is the crime of digging up dead bodies which would then be sold. To medical colleges, teaching-hospitals, anatomical colleges, doctors and surgeons, to be precise. It was a crime prevelant in many countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the United Kingdom, especially, it was at epidemic proportions before the 1830s. If you’ve ever seen those old Georgian-era churchyards and cemetaries and seen the fenced-in burial-plots or those huge, wrough-iron fences with the adorable, razor-sharp spikes on top that are built around the perimeter of graveyards, those aren’t just there for morbid decoration. They were designed as a deterrent for body-snatchers, who would raid cemeteries at night to steal freshly-buried corpses!

For those of you who have heard of the saying of ‘doing the graveyard shift’, the crime of body-snatching was what made this shift so necessary. City watchmen and constables would perform the graveyard shift in churchyards and cemeteries at night to stop people digging up corpses! You can imagine how rife this must’ve been if the phrase ‘the graveyard shift’ has survived over two hundred years to be still used in the 21st Century!

Why would people want to Snatch Bodies?

As I’ve explained, ‘body-snatching’ is the crime of digging up freshly-buried corpses, and that this crime was particularly rife during the Georgian and Regency Era.

But why?

You have to admit that willingly wanting to break into a churchyard at night to dig up a dead guy is not something most people would want to do, hardened criminal or not. So why was this crime so popular?

Legislation is designed to prevent crime and aid humanity, but sometimes, and sometimes more often than not, it, aids crime and prevents humanity. In this case, legislation prevented humanity from learning all that it could about…humanity. And it aided criminals who were willing to help humanity better understand itself.

In the 18th century, medical science was advancing at a slow, if steady rate. Slowly, people were casting off the old-fashioned medical beliefs that had been taught and passed down for centuries since ancient times. Medical students were not interested in humors or blood-letting or spells and potions. They were interested in finding out how the human body was composed and how it worked. To aid curious and hungry growing medical minds, anatomical colleges and great medical teaching hospitals were created in the 17th and 18th and early 19th centuries. Doctors and surgeons or medical students flooded to these institutions so that they might learn more about how the human body worked and how they could better treat and cure it.

But for people to understand how the human body worked they first needed bodies.

An old operating or dissection theatre. If you’ve ever wondered why they were called ‘operating THEATRES’, it’s because these were the chambers where medical students would go to watch their lecturers put on a show about the human body and they were set out, quite literally, like theatres. Students would stand on the tiers above and around the central stage to observe the doctor or surgeon dissecting or operating on the body below (which would be on an operating or dissection table). The wooden rails were there so that students could lean on them and be more comfortable

The problem was, in 18th century England, bodies were notoriously hard to come by. The only bodies that could be given to such medical instruction schools for the purposes of studying anatomy were those of murderers, suiciders or the destitute who had died by execution, their own hand or through neglect and poor health. All well and good, but how many people are hanged each year? Or commit suicide? Or are found dead on the streets? Probably a fair few, but that was few enough. These were the ONLY way that such medical institutions could get their hands on bodies. Even if someone DIED and had stated in their WILL that they desired their remains to be left for the purposes of science and learning, this was against the law. There simply were not enough ‘state-provided’ corpses to be sent to medical colleges for professors and doctors to teach their students about the intricacies of the human body. They needed more bodies. And they didn’t really ask questions about where the bodies came from…if you get my drift.

Enter: The Ressurectionist. Also called ressurection-men or ‘body-snatchers’, these men would break into churchyards and cemeteries under cover of darkness to dig up corpses that had been recently buried, and send them off to doctors and surgeons who could use them to teach their students about the human body. There was big business in body-snatching. Of course, doctors have always been wealthy people, and they could…and would…pay generously for a really nice ‘specimen’. This led to the rise of the body-snatcher in the 18th century.

How was Body-Snatching Done?

It was just as well that stealing bodies paid really well (or well enough, at least), because stealing them in the first place was pretty damn hard. To begin with, you needed to find a graveyard. Having found it, you had to get over the numerous obstacles that protected it. Gates were locked at night, bars couldn’t be squeezed through and it could be tricky climbing over the sharp, wrought-iron railings. Coupled with that, there were often watchmen or police-constables on patrol, doing “the graveyard shift”. There were even watch-towers in larger cemeteries!

The tower in the middle of this cemetery (round, white building) was built for watchmen to stand guard in, and keep an eye out for body-snatchers at night

If you got past all these obstacles and barricades, you still had to dig up the body. And there was a lot of digging. To be ‘six feet under’ isn’t just a euphamism for death, it was also quite literally how deep a coffin was buried under ground! At a rough calculation, you would have to dig out about 72 cubic feet of soil with nothing but a shovel, by lamplight, risking discovery with each shovelful of earth. And once you found the coffin, you had to get it open. Coffins were often nailed shut and would have to be forced open with a crowbar. Having gotten the coffin open, you had to get the body out (a dead weight of say, 200lbs, less or more, depending on the individual) and then you’d have to close the coffin and then bury the empty coffin all over again in an operation that could take over an hour! And even then you still had to smuggle the corpse out of the cemetery!

Body-snatching, rather obviously, was against the law. Punishments for body-snatching ranged from fines to terms of imprisonment. Occasionally, body-snatching even resulted in execution. The famous body-snatchers, Williams Burke and Hare, who were Irish immigrants in Scotland, would actually murder people so that they could sell the corpses to Dr. John Knox, who ran an anatomy school in Edinburgh, Scotland. Burke was hanged for murder in January, 1829, after Hare testified against him. Hare was never prosecuted for murder and went free, but Burke’s body, as with all bodies that were hanged…was donated to a medical college for dissection. A rather fitting end.

The End of the Body-Snatchers

The crime of body-snatching, in the United Kingdom, at least, ended in 1832. The Burke and Hare murders had highlighted to the population that there was a serious and legitimate need of dead bodies, by medical instruction colleges. Doctors, surgeons and anatomists needed dead bodies if they were to teach medical students about their own bodies. In order to further the cause of medical science and to prevent further cases of body-snatching, the British parliament passed the Anatomy Act in 1832.

Under the Murder Act of 1752, only the bodies of executed criminals could be used for medical dissections. By the passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832, Parliament allowed, amongst other things…

— People to donate their remains to science in their wills (unless the family objected, and if they did, then the body would be interred).
— Doctors and surgeons the legal right to claim any unclaimed corpses from prisons or workhouses, for the purposes of medical science.
— For proper regulation of anatomical teachers (who were thereafter required to register a license as a lawful teacher of human anatomy).

08/02/2011 by Scheong

Pen Profile: Waterman #12 ‘Secretary’ eyedropper (1904)

From the 1890s until the 1950s, the Waterman Pen Company was famous for manufacturing awesome fountain pens. Their vintage pens are among the most famous and collectable in the world. I’ve always wanted one, especially one of their lovely Red Ripple hard rubber (also called ‘Woodgrain”) pens…but that was not to be.

Until recently.

No I didn’t get a woodgrain pen…but I did get something just as interesting:

This is a Waterman #12 ‘Secretary’ pen from 1904. Like all pens from the era, it’s made from hard rubber, and like almost all pens from the era, it’s an eyedropper. I like eyedroppers. Messy as they are to use, they are, nonetheless, idiotproof. Unscrew the pen-barrel, squirt in the ink, screw the barrel shut…and write! What could be more idiotproof than that?

Apparently people were stupider back then because the original box, which comes with the original instructions, have written on those instructions rather detailed steps about how to use an eyedropper pen. Although it’s probably not surprising that instructions were made that detailed – fountain pens were like iPads in 1904 and were only just becoming a commercial viablity.

I bought this pen for a variety of reasons, at the 2010 Melbourne Pen Show. The first reason is I didn’t own a vintage Waterman at the time and especially not one as cool as this. Second…I’ve never owned a pen this old that came with its original packaging and instructions! Third, it has a really sweet superflexible nib (also called a ‘wet noodle’) which oozes characteristics that most pens today would strip their gold to have.

Reading the advertising material on the box is a wonderful step into history, seeing just how Waterman marketed its products. The underside of the box is entirely devoted to warning the customer about fake Waterman fountain pens, instructing them to “make sure when buying a Waterman’s Ideal Fountain Pen, to see that our trademarks are stamped on every gold nib and on every holder”. I think it’s also very telling of how revolutionary the idea of a portable reservoir pen was at the turn of the century, when you read the instruction (that has shown up on every single pre-1910 pen-box that I’ve ever seen), that says (all in big, bold, underlined capitals):

“DO NOT REMOVE GOLD NIB FROM THE HOLDER”

When Waterman was advertising to a public which had only ever grown up using steel dip-pens with easily-broken, rusty nibs which had to be removed and replaced every few months, this instruction was very important, and again shows just how new the novelty of the fountain pen was. The pen itself is rather simple. Black, chased hard rubber with two gold bands around it. The nib is a New York Waterman’s #2 nib in 14kt gold, which is about as flexible as you could get. The pen fills easily (if messily) and writes smoothly. I love it!

Eyedropper pens such as this lasted until about 1915, when more practical self-fillers, such as Conklin’s crescent, Sheaffer’s lever and Parker’s button-filler began to replace them and become more popular with writers. But that doesn’t make those pens any better writers, just better fillers, and fountain pens of this vintage are as much fun to use as those made decades later.

27/01/2011 by Scheong

The Laptop Computer is Nothing New: The History of Writing Boxes

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone invented a device or a storage-facility that could hold all your documents and word-processing hardware and software and lock it up safely, out of reach of fiddly hands and out of sight of prying eyes? A storage facility that was portable and light and handy and which you could take with you anywhere that you wished, and which you could, in a pinch, open and access all those documents that you so desperately needed?

“Yeah we have that. They’re called laptops”, someone might say.

But what about the days before the laptop? What if you were travelling from London to New York or New York to Los Angeles or Melbourne to Hong Kong a hundred years ago and you had a whole heap of documents to bring with you that you couldn’t just stuff into a briefcase. What then?

Enter the Georgian answer to a “Generation @” question. How to store your files and folders when you’re on the move: The Writing Box.

What is a Writing Box?

Also called a writing case, dispatch case, dispatch box, writing chest or lap-desk, a writing box was mankind’s answer to the laptop computer in the days before…well…laptops! These boxes or cases were designed to be desks or offices…packed into a box. They ranged from the plainest of plain-Jane boxes, to the most elaborate, fanciful, foppish boxes that you could imagine, inlaid with pretty woods, ivory, pearls and other wonderful materials that did absolutely nothing to the practicality of the box and only increased its weight. But, whether a banged-up ‘entry’ model or a super-deluxe model, writing boxes were designed to hold everything a 19th century professional gentleman needed for correspondence and business and were stocked with everything that one could expect to find in an office, study, den or standard bureau desk of the era.

Such boxes typically came equipped with locks, keys, a writing-surface, inkwells, lightwells, pen-trays, pidgeon-holes, storage-spaces for such essentials as paper, seals, sealing-wax, nibs, postage-stamps, envelopes, pencils, money and enough little hidden compartments to spirit away the Crown Jewels right under the nose of the queen. They really were offices in a box. They were the iPads of their day, transforming a huge, bulky thing like this…

…into a compact little thing like this, small enough to put in your steamer-trunk:

Isn’t that just lovely!?

The History of Writing Boxes

In a day before passwords, ID numbers, retina-scanners and fingerprint-readers, professional men were always on the lookout for a way to safeguard all their precious documents such as private letters, deeds, wills and testaments and other important pieces of paper…like birthday cards from mummy.

To hide these things from prying eyes (especially those birthday cards!), men would store these papers in boxes when they weren’t at their desks, and lock them to keep them secure. The first writing-boxes like these were descendant from “bible-boxes” and came into being in the 1600s. Bible-boxes were used to…as the name suggests…store bibles in, during an era when bibles were expensive, handwritten documents worth their weight in gold and liable to be stolen.

Eventually, in the second half of the 17th century, such ‘bible-boxes’ were repurposed or the design was taken and improved, and the first incarnation of the writing-box appeared on the scene, as a rectangular box with a sloping lid. The box held papers and the sloping lid was the writing surface. They looked a bit like this:

This bible-box with a sloping lid for reading and writing dates from 1673

Such boxes provided a ‘desk on the move’ for such people as merchants, members of the clergy and professional men of the turn of the 18th century. But pretty soon you’ll see a big problem with these boxes.

They’re not squared off.

In the blocky world of the 1700s, where squarish chests and trunks and boxes were stacked onto the rooves of carriages and sent rattling and bumping halfway across Europe and America, a box with an irregular, sloping lid was difficult to pack and wasted space when it came time for people to pack up their new, 2hp fourwheeled carriage for the drive from London to Bath in 1725. A better and more practical design was needed.

As the 1700s progressed, some smart fellow realised that if he sliced a rectangle in half, diagonally, and moved the cutting-line so that it was slightly off, when this was applied to a box, when the lid was opened and laid down flat, a complete, compact writing-slope could be created for anyone who wanted to use it. When business was done, the slope was simply folded up into a neat little box. Such was the basic form of the writing box for the next two hundred years.

A writing box from 1790. Note the diagonal cut on the side of the box which would allow it to be opened up to present a sloped writing-surface for the user, and the spare drawer in the side of the box for storing writing-equipment

Once the form of the box was established and the basic design had been finalised, writing boxes became wildly popular. Maybe people in their wigs, tricorne hats and long coats lined up outside the local carpenter’s shop at 4:30 in the morning to get the new iBox 1.1 in 1730 or something.

Such was the popularity of the writing box that they started being used by and for everyone and everything. Their practicality and portability allowed them to be carried on journeys, on long sea-voyages, on military campaigns, scientific and geographic expeditions and even for a trip out of town to visit the Duke for the weekend shooting-party. It was during this time that writing boxes became fine pieces of craftsmanship, handmade by cabinetmakers, carpenters and skilled artisans. They ranged from sturdy, utilitarian pieces with brass-edgings to protect the wooden corners from damage…

…to exquisite, five-star models with inlaying on the outside of the case, brass handles, beautiful leather writing-slopes and lots of secret compartments:

As time progressed, writing boxes only became more and more popular and people from all walks of life, both men and women, carried them around for their own personal use. Unlike a desk which was a piece of furniture that anybody used, a writing box was considered a personal and private accessory, like a woman’s handbag or a man’s briefcase. Only your most personal and important documents or necessities were stored within its sides.

In trying to understand why writing boxes lasted so long, one has to understand the nature of correspondence, communication and just good-old-fashioned pen-pushing back in the “good old days”. Even in the third quarter of the 19th century, writing boxes remained essential pieces of travelling kit and they were essential when you consider what they were used for.

Why, for example, were writing-boxes carried everywhere? Surely it was easier to carry a pen?

Well…the first practical fountain pens didn’t finally show up until around 1895. Before then, a dip-pen and inkwell was the only way to go. Before you could get ink that was bottled in safe, screw-top, leakproof bottles, a travelling inkwell, which had a lid that locked securely and a rubber or leather seal to prevent leakage, was the only ink supply you were likely to get. And with the dip-pen shaft came the little box of nibs or ‘pens’ as they were called then, that went with it. This was a lot of things to carry around in your pocket when all you wanted to do was write “c u back @ home 2nite” on the back of your Victorian calling-card at King’s Cross Station in London.

Writing boxes therefore carried everything that you needed to do business. Mostly though, they were used for correspondence. Most likely, their contents included seals and sealing-wax, stamps, a couple of envelopes, notepaper, nibs or quills and a pen-shaft. All writing-boxes also had a dedicated slot or alcove where a sealed inkwell would sit. Such wells usually came with the box as a set.

Apart from the fact that writing on the move was rather tricky before the invention of the fountain pen, the fact of the matter was that a lot of Victorians and Georgians carried around a frightful amount of paper with them, especially when travelling. Before the age of the electric telegraph in the 1840s and 50s, sending a letter was easy. Receiving a reply could take months! To cope with likely memory-loss, most people wrote two letters! One for themselves and one to send to their friend or member of their family. That’s why all those old-fashioned desks have those pidgeon-holes. When it took three months to get a reply, you wanted to be damn sure you remembered what you mentioned in your letter in the first place! This accounts for why writing-boxes had so many cubbyholes and storage-spaces underneath the writing-slopes.

The Victorian Writing Box

Writing boxes in all honesty, probably didn’t die out until well into the 20th century and each era had its own special designs of writing-boxes. Elaborate Victorian boxes looked very different from their Stuart grandparents in the 1660s, since the Victorians were communicating faster with more people and had more papers and documents to store. Telegrams and letters meant that news moved faster and secrets had to be kept even safer. While secrecy was still important and it wasn’t uncommon for such boxes to have secret compartments, emphasis moved more to storage and organisation than anything else.

Here is a series of photos detailing what a writing box belonging to a businessman or other wealthy professional who did a good deal of travelling, would have looked like in the 1880s up to the turn of the 20th century:

Typical in design of most boxes from the middle-Georgian era up to the turn of the 20th century, this three-fold writing box is representative of the fine, top-quality boxes made during the the heyday of this unique piece of office-equipment. Swathed in black leather on the outside and navy blue leather inside, this box measures 10.5in. wide by 6.5in. high and 15in. long. It is fitted with brass hinges, propping hinges, locks and a folding handle on the lid.

Unlocking the box and raising the lid reveals the three smooth panels of ivory which collectively were called an “aide memoire” (Latin. Literally ‘Memory Aide’) which was basically a really fancy notebook for you to jot down any quick notes that you needed to remember, with a pencil. These pencil-marks could later be erased with the wipe of a damp cloth. The dark blue leather is also visible along with the pen-tray and the two boxes for “LIGHT” (matches) and “INK” (a travelling inkwell).

When opened, the underside of the lid reveals compartments for storing papers as well as sleeves for holding the writing box’s original desktop implements, made of elephant-tusk ivory:

This panel on the underside of the lid slides into a recess behind it so that the top of the box can close and lock smoothly down upon the part below it. The ivory utensils comprise of a letter-opener, a paper-folder, an old pencil (sadly, not made of ivory!) and an ivory-shafted parchment-scraping knife, used to remove dried ink from paper by scraping the edge of the knifeblade over the parchment to remove the stained paper-fibres. The black, leather sheath is marked with “JOSEPH RODGERS & SONS / CUTLERS TO HER MAJESTY”. The Joseph Rodgers company was a famous manufacturer of cutlery, ranging from first-class silverware to paperknives to fine gentlemen’s grooming equipment (err…straight razors!).

The paper or parchment-folder (the thin piece of ivory above the pencil) is an interesting implement used by only a few people today…mostly book-restorers and bookbinders…and which was used to help fold letters and handmade envelopes back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Modern envelopes are a relatively new invention and before their arrival, most letters were themselves folded into their own, handmade envelopes before the whole thing was sealed with wax, addressed and posted. A paper-folder such as that one was used to make sure that the lines and folds of the letter were clean and crisp and as tight as possible, so that it could be folded up to make its own envelope.

Removing the pen-tray from between the “LIGHT” and “INK” boxes reveals the secret compartment underneath (which these boxes were famous for having), which served as extra storage-space for writing necesities such as nibs, extra pen-shafts, sealing-wax and sealing-stamps. Postage-stamps might also be stored down there.

Modern matchsticks as we know them today, were invented in the 1820s and they were soon given their own little boxes in writing boxes, along with their partners, the travelling inkwell:

These matches are the original strike-anywhere ‘vesta’ matches. The inkwell has had a modern, plastic insert put inside it to replace the original liner (probably made of either glass or ceramic) which has been lost over the last hundred or so years. Matchboxes like the one pictured also came with a specially inbuilt striking-surface and match-holder to put the lit match in while lighting a cigarette or, as was probably more common, lighting a candle or a stick of sealing wax:

The match-holder is the small, round hole in the bottom right of the matchbox, below the striking-surface.

Another famous feature of all writing boxes was that the leather writing-slopes had leaves which could be lifted up to reveal extra storage for paper underneath. And this one is no exception:

Another common feature on boxes such as this was the catch on the bottom leaf of the writing-slope, to prevent the leaf from falling open when the box was folded up and locked:

This particular box was manufactured by the Toulmin & Gale Company of London and dates to about 1885-1890 and it’s part of my personal collection of writing instruments and paraphernalia. It was also the inspiration for this article.

Writing Boxes Today

Once an essential piece of luggage for anyone travelling further than six feet from a desk or a public inkwell, writing boxes eventually died out as practical pieces of office-equipment and convenient desks-in-a-box during the 20th century. The invention of the fountain pen and the growing popularity of the mechanical typewriter meant that it was easier to write and correspond on the move without carrying around what would soon become a historical curiosity. As reservoir fountain pens became cheaper and more widely available, boxes such as the one above were soon forgotten. Their very historical significance was forgotten the moment the latest Parker or Sheaffer or Waterman hit the shelves of stationers’ shops all over the world and many were shoved away into attics, basements or just plain thrown out. For that reason, they can be treasured and valuable antiques today, worth anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. Many writing-boxes were simply trashed, smashed and thrashed, their locks broken, leaves ripped out, inkwells smashed or lost and their secret compartments destroyed. Some were repurposed as sewing-boxes, piggybanks, nick-nack nooks and other, more practical things.

Many of the surviving examples from the Georgian or Victorian era, such as the ones featured in this article, are more often than not, locked away in museums behind glass cases where people can see them and appreciate them from a distance. Boxes of a quality such as the one in my collection are quite rare and are usually museum-pieces. Boxes which are as in good a condition as mine and which as complete as mine are rarer still – many of them have all their utensils broken, broken up or just plain lost over the fifty or more years since these boxes were ever used as desks on the move.

If you own a writing box such as one that might be featured in this article, be it one that you bought at an antiques shop or which you inherited from family…Look after it. They are rare and beautiful pieces of writing history which should be treasured for centuries to come.

09/12/2010 by Scheong

For Jesus Christ our Savior was Born upon This Day – And other Myths, Legends and Traditions that created the Modern Christmas

As December finally makes it onto our calenders and as the year draws to a close, the time of year again has come, to relax and enjoy time with friends and family and to participate in everything that constitutes that most wonderful of all holidays and occasions…Christmas!

Yet, despite what we all might think, that Christmas is a time-honoured holiday that’s been around since before the Sun was born, the truth is that the modern Christmas that we have today, with presents and trees and puddings, birds and candles, tinsel and other little nicknacks, has only been around for a relatively short period of time. The Christmas that most of us would recognise today only ever came around about a hundred and fifty years ago during the early Victorian era during which, bit by bit, the various elements of Christmas now familiar with almost everyone, were slowly drawn into the big celebration that we know today.

What and When is Christmas?

Everyone will tell you that Christmas, celebrated on the 25th of December, commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ.

…but it doesn’t.

Because Jesus Christ was never born in December.

Jesus Christ was actually born in the middle of the year, probably during the spring months between March and May.

So if Jesus wasn’t born in December, and if by extension, Christmas therefore shouldn’t take place in December…why does it?

And so begins the first element of the Modern Christmas – Celebrating it in December.

The truth is that what we now think of as Christmas, as being a celebration of the birth of Christ, was actually stolen from someone else, like so many other things in history. But who was it stolen from?

The 17th to the 23rd of December in the Ancient Roman calender was the Midwinter Feast of Saturnalia, where Romans honoured Saturnus, the God of Agriculture. It was during this time that Romans gave each other presents, drank excessively, gorged themselves on food and was the one time in the Roman year where Masters and Slaves were considered equals. But what does this mean for Christmas? Well, just look at it! Booze, food, presents…everyone wants that, right? Well Christians tried to get people to celebrate the birth of Christ…only nobody was interested in that. They all wanted to celebrate Saturnalia instead. So, going with the age-old addage that if you can’t beat them, join them, Christians conveniently moved Jesus’s birth a few months ahead and did a bit of tampering with his heavenly birth-certificate to make it that Christ was born in mid-December…smack-bang in the middle of Saturnalia.

…Which is why we celebrate Christmas in December and not in April.

Santa Claus is Coming to Town

Aah, Santa. We like Santa. A big, fat guy with a white beard, a red suit and big, black boots who goes around handing out presents, giving cuddles, candy and…coal…to naughty children. But where did Santa and his happy little elves come from?

In recent years, with all kinds of lawsuits being plastered all over this poor old guy, from claiming that he promoted childhood obesity, to saying that his merry laugh was offensive to women, to joking that he liked his job because he knew where all the naughty boys and girls lived…we’ve kinda forgotten where Santa came from. Which is a pty. Because he knows where we all are, right?

“Santa Claus” actually comes from a fellow named Sinterklaas (see the similar names?). Sinterklaas comes from the Christmas traditions of northern Europe, particularly Belgium and Holland. He may also be better known by the name St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children. In early December, Sinterklaas would go around Europe, giving children presents and treats while they were asleep, hiding toys and candy in their shoes and socks. The Dutch traditionally celebrated Sinterklaas’s birthday on the 5th of December, and presumably, Sinterklaas decided to pay them back by giving the children little treats, which is why we hang Christmas stockings over our fireplaces today. It was from this European saint that we get the Santa Claus that we know today.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Had a Very Shiny Nose

…and because of that, he was almost never created at all.

Rudolph is famous as being Santa’s annual headlight, who pulls the fat man’s sleigh across the skies during Christmas, delivering presents, guiding the bearded FedEx courier to every house in the world in just a single night. But it may surprise you to know that Rudolph isn’t part of Santa’s original set of reindeer!

In the famous poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (AKA – “A Night Before Christmas”), published in 1823, Santa has eight reindeer – Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen! So as you can see, Rudolph ain’t a member of the original Reindeer Clique. So where did he come from?

Rudolph actually came on the scene over a hundred years later! He was born in the brain of a fellow named Robert May, a copywriter for the Montegomery Ward department-store chain. The Montegomery Ward Co. had asked May to create a Christmas story for them, something cheerful and fun and suitable for children. The bosses of Montegomery Ward were going to put it into colouring books and children’s picture-books, ready for Christmas in 1939! And given what happened in 1939, it was probably just as well that Rudolph was created, because people probably needed extra reason to be jolly that year – which might be helped if they had a cute, cuddly little reindeer to read about.

May had gone through several names for Rudolph. His story was about a reindeer who just didn’t fit in with anybody and May wanted a name that was simple but sweet. “Rollo” sounded too cute and playful. “Reginald” (another name May had dithered over) was also rejected because he thought it sounded too British (it’s also the first name of Mr. Wooster’s valet – Reginald Jeeves, and you can’t get more British than that!). Eventually, May selected the name Rudolph. It would work well with the sing-song poem that he was writing for his story.

May tested his new Christmas story bit by bit on his then four-year-old daughter, Barbra May. Little Barbra loved the story and thought it was wonderful…but as always, adults have a way of overreacting to things that kids find cute. The Montegomery Ward fat cats thought that a story about a red-nosed reindeer was terrible! Red noses were for people who drank too much and who got thrown in the holding-cell at the local police-station for being drunk and rowdy! No! It’s terrible!

May was furious about this refusal of his awesome new kids’ story, so he had a word with Denver Gillen. Denver worked in the art department at Montegomery Ward and was one of May’s best friends. Together, the two men went to the local zoo where Gillen sketched some deer to show their bosses exactly what would be seen in the final storybook. Eventually, May’s boss relented and, despite wartime rationing of paper, by 1946, over six million copies of May’s new Christmas story had been run off the printing-press!

The Twelve Days of Christmas

In today’s modern world, Christmas is Christmas. It happens on the 25th of December and that’s it. Right?

Well…actually no. You see, if you told that to everyone, then all the kids would be asking you what the hell happened to all the other eleven days of Christmas. You know, like in that song? With the partridge and the pear-tree and the ducks and chickens and milkmaids and the gold rings and all that.

First off, the 25th of December is not the first day of Christmas.

The very first day of Christmas is actually the day AFTER the 25th…the 26th of December, which is the Feast Day of St. Stephen. The feast lasts for three days, until the 29th of December, which is the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents. That continues until New Year’s Eve on the 31st of December. The 1st of January is the Feast Day of St. Basil. Feasting in honour of various events and saints continues until it finally ends on the 6th of January with the Twelfth Night which marks the coming of the Christian epiphany. And those are the twelve days of Christmas.

The Christmas Tree

Aaah, Christmas Trees. We love Christmas trees. For centuries, people all over the world have loved Christmas trees!

Wrong.

In actual fact, the Christmas tree is actually a rather recent invention. Although it has ancient roots, the Christmas tree that we all know today only showed up in the 1800s! It had been a big tradition in the German countries and states in the middle of Europe for centuries to decorate trees for Christmas. It was a tradition brought to England by Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. When a picture of the British Royal Family around a Christmas tree was published in 1848…

…tree mania struck the British Isles. As with everything that celebrities do, everyone else wants to do it too. And within a few years, the annual tradition of Christmas trees had gone from a small, German tradition to an almost worldwide annual event!

The Yule Log

The burning of a massive log at Christmas…the Yule Log…is a long and ancient tradition. The log is so big because it was needed to burn throughout the twelve days of Christmas, from the 26th of December until the 6th of January. But where does the tradition of the Yule Log come from?

It’s actually a Viking tradition. Vikings would burn huge logs during their holiday of Yula. Yula celebrated the death of the old year during winter, and the birth of the New year the following spring. As spring is the time for new growth and rebirth, praying for fertility was very important. To ensure fertility, what better way to get good crops, new baby animals and new children, than to set fire to one of the biggest phallic symbols in the world…a massive tree-trunk! The burning of a yule log eventually melded into the other traditions of Christmas that we have today.

Mmmm…fertility…

Christmas Pudding

Christmas pudding. Made of dried fruis and drenched with booze, it’s sweet, tangy, squeegy and delicious. Eating pudding at Christmas has been a tradition for centuries, but the modern pudding only came around during the Victorian era. Before then, Christmas pudding was something most of us probably woudln’t have touched with a punting-pole!

Christmas pudding has its origins in the 15th century. In the early 1400s, people would preserve their meat by drying it and wrapping it in pastry along with fruit. This is where we get those cute little mince pies that we love eating at Christmas, but it’s also where we get the modern Christmas pudding from.

Eventually, pies evolved to a food called ‘pottage’, ‘porridge’ or ‘pudding’ (from which we get the different versions of the song “Pease Porridge”). Pottage, to use the original term, got its name because meat and fruit were cooked in a cauldron, a huge pot, along with sugar and spices to perserve it. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I, who had a bit of a sweet-tooth, decided to add more fruit to the mixture to make it taste better.

By Georgian times, preserving meat by mixing it with fruit was out of fashion and was also old-fashioned, because by the 18th century, people had figured out better (and more importantly – tastier) ways of preserving meat. It was around this time that the meat element of Christmas pies and puddings started disappearing and by the early Victorian era in the 1840s, the modern Christmas pudding and pie, with its sweet, tender fruits drenched in alcohol (traditionally – brandy) had arrived.

Eat up, everybody!

Christmas Cards

Christmas is a time for food, drink, family, friends, presents…and those gawd-awful tacky, cheesy, lame, pathetic, yawn-inducing bloody Christmas cards! Sometimes, don’t you wish you could just kill the guy who created the first one?

Well unfortunately for us, Old Father Time already beat us to the mark, because the guy who created the first-ever Christmas card is long dead.

That’s right, there was actually person behind this one, and not just some nameless legendary figure, either. His name was Sir Henry Cole and it was his dubious honour to be named the person who gave us the modern Christmas card! That probably wouldn’t make him too merry today, unlike His Majesty King Cole, to whom Henry was, probably thankfully, not related.

Sir Henry Cole invented the Christmas card, or rather, commissioned the idea of creating them, in the early 1840s. Together with the help of the artist Jon Callcott Horsley, Cole came up with the following:

This is literally the first store-bought Christmas-card that was ever made. It came out in 1843 and it started off a whole new tradition, that of posting Christmas cards to people every December.

When is a Door Not a Door?

Christmas Crackers, another cheesy crazy Christmas tradition. Invented by Tom Smith in 1847, the Christmas cracker had its origins in French traditions. While in Paris in 1840, Smith discovered the French almond candy, the ‘bon-bon’. Smith was a baker by trade, and was always looking for interesting ways to improve his business. He liked this idea of bon-bons, which lovers traditionally gave to each other at Christmas. Smith also took inspiration for the Christmas cracker from the Chinese fortune cookie, which is actually an American invention. He noticed that fortune-cookies had little messages and sayings stuck inside them, and he thought this might be a fun little tradition to do during Christmas.

By the mid-1840s, Smith’s prosperity was growing and legend had it that in 1846, while he was relaxing next to his fireplace, the crackling of the burning firewood gave him an idea! To make little exploding crackers with messages and candy inside them! The idea so-consumed Smith that he spent ages trying to figure out how to create little exploding packages. It wasn’t easy – He nearly blew off his hands in the process! He finally created two strips of cardboard coated with saltpetre (potassium nitrate) which, when rubbed together, let off an audiable ‘bang!’ without blowing your hands to pieces!

With more experimentation, Smith developed the modern Christmas cracker, that lets out a ‘bang!’ when you rip it apart and gives you a horrible, cheap joke written on a piece of paper inside it. By the turn of the century, Smith’s invention had taken the world by storm, and it was around this time that he also started adding not only candy, but also little toys to the crackers as well, and yet another tradition was born.

And there you have it. Santa Claus, crackers, trees, drunken, red-schnozzed reindeer who swilled the brandy that was going to be put on the pudding, and the Yule Log and Christmas card, all the symbols and traditions of the modern Christmas that we have today, during which we celebrate the birth of someone who actually popped into world nine months earlier…

…Merry Christmas, Everybody.

20/11/2010 by Scheong

Still More Common English Phrases

Pin Money

To have your ‘pin money’ means to have a bit of extra money…just in case. This expression dates to the 1500s in England. During the Tudor period, small brass and copper pins were essential for dressing. Without the modern safety-pin or an abundance of buttons and buttonholes, clothing was held together with simple, mass-produced pins. Your ‘pin money’ was the essential money that you needed at all times to buy dressing-pins for your clothing.

Uppercase and Lowercase

Capital letters and small letters in text are often called “uppercase” and “lowercase” letters. Why? Why are they up and why are they down? And what cases are there that we can see, anyway?

Uppercase and lowercase letters come from around the 18th century and it relates the occupation of professional printer.

Printing-presses were fairly common in the centuries after the 1500s, but printing was still a skilled art that required strict organisation of everything that the printer did, if a printed page was to turn out correctly. Printing with little metal blocks of movable type meant that there were literally hundreds of tiny little metal cubes and blocks all over the print-shop. To organise these blocks effectively, they were placed into wooden cases with little pidgeon-holes in them for each letter and punctuation-mark. These cases were stacked on top of each other for better organisation. Capital letters were placed in the upper case, where they would be out of the way of the more frequently-used smaller letters, which were placed in the second, lower case. The adoption of this system gradually led to the two terms “uppercase and lowercase”, referring to big and small letters.

The Wrong End of the Stick

To have the “wrong end of the stick” means to believe that you’re doing something correctly, only to find out later that you’re not doing it correctly at all. But why a stick? What does a stick have to do with anything? Why not a sword? Or a knife? Or a bow and arrow?

Again, this is a phrase that comes from the world of printing. The ‘stick’ in this case, refers to the composing stick or the compositor’s stick, which was a long, thin frame used by the printer when he was creating lines of text. Individual lines of text were composed in the composing stick before they were transferred, row by row, to the press-bed, until an entire page was completed, inked and made ready for printing.

To have the “wrong end of the stick” meant to have the stick by the…wrong end. This meant that when you transferred the letters from the stick to the press-bed, you rather spectacularly messed up the ordering of the letters, resulting in everything being printed out backwards! Thus, having the wrong end of the stick really is a big mistake!

Stool

A stool is a solid lump of faecal matter. Delightful. But why is it called a ‘stool’?

Like many things, this slang-term for faeces is shrouded in a big, stinking cloud of mystery. The word ‘stool’, meaning faeces, comes from the 1500s. Before the days of running water, one would use a piece of furniture called a ‘close stool’ to go to the toilet in. A close stool was basically a box with a padded lid with a hole in it. Inside the box, under the hole was a bucket. Over time, the evidence of the close stool’s use, which was collected in the bucket after each event, became known as…stools.

Bob’s Your Uncle

If someone says that “Bob’s your Uncle”, he means ‘there you are!’, ‘done!’, ‘You’re in the club! Huzzah!’. But who was Bob and what did it matter that he was your uncle? And what if your uncle was named Richard…what the hell did you do then?

But who is Uncle Bob, and what does he have to do with all this?

Uncle Bob was actually a real person. His name was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil and he was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1895-1902. And it was his famous act of nepotism (nepotism is favouritism for family-members in matters of professionalism) regarding his nephew, Arthur Balfour in 1886, that gave rise to this popular phrase today. In 1886, Arthur’s Uncle Robert gave him the position of Secretary of Ireland. Many people think that the only reason Balfour got the job was because of his uncle’s favouritism and that he didn’t really deserve the post.

Yanking your Chain

If someone’s ‘yanking your chain’, it means they’re having a larf at your expense. Having a giggle. A bit of a practical joke. What is your chain and why are they yanking it?

The origins of this phrase go back to the mid 1800s to the United States. In parts of America where there was a lot of mining, for gold, coal or other raw materials found deep underground, miners often didn’t have a toilet nearby to relieve themselves in on their long, underground shifts. This situation was slightly remedied by the adaptation of mining-carts which became the port-a-potties of the 19th Century. The top of the mining-cart would be boarded over and these boards would be made into a hinged lid with a hole in it, leading to the bucket inside the cart which caught any bodily waste.

This commode on wheels was always kept near to where the miners were working so that they could relieve themselves if necesary, without having to go all the way outside. Of course, for obvious reasons, the cart was never kept too close to the mine-face. To stop it rolling down the mine’s railroad tracks and causing a disgusting and disasterous accident, a length of chain was looped over and under the cart’s wheels, to jam them in place and to keep the cart at a safe distance. A common practical joke was for, when one miner was using the cart to relieve himself, another miner would sneak up to the cart and start yanking away the chain that acted as the cart’s brake, causing the cart to rattle off down the mine. This gave birth to the expression, to yank someone’s chain.

12/10/2010 by Scheong

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

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

Or that’s how Hollywood portrayed it, anyway.

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

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

Stalag Luft III, Sagan, Poland

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

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

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

Anti-Escape Measures

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

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

Plans of Escape

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

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

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

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

Preparing the Tunnels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digging the Tunnels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Escape-Aids and How they were Made

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

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

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

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

Bribing the Guards

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

The Great Escape

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

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

Things went bad from the start.

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

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

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

‘Harry’ today

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

The Escapees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the Fifty

03/10/2010 by Scheong

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

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

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

A Note on the Title

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

The Purpose of the Great Wall

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

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

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

Building the Great Wall

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

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

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

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

The Greatness of the Wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

21/09/2010 by Scheong

The Story of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Roebling Family Production

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

Before the Bridge

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

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

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

The Roebling Family

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

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

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

Construction of the Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working Underwater

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behind Every Great Man is a Great Woman

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

Emily Warren Roebling.

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

And she was only twenty-nine years old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Completion of the Bridge

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

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

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

Brooklyn Bridge Facts

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

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

Throughout History

A blog about antiques and history!

Author Archives

The Biggest Maritime Disaster Ever: The M.V. Wilhelm Gustloff

Taking the Waters: The History of the Modern Soft-Drink

Bringing out the Dead: The Life of a Body-Snatcher

Pen Profile: Waterman #12 ‘Secretary’ eyedropper (1904)

The Laptop Computer is Nothing New: The History of Writing Boxes

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

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

The Story of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Roebling Family Production

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: