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Scuttling Along…

I took up traditional wetshaving in January this year. That means shaving-soap, shaving-brush, double-edged safety-razor, razor-sharpener and of course…having somewhere to mix up my shaving-soap. Oh…and hot water, as Jeremy Brett is constantly yelling out to Mrs. Hudson for, in the Granada ‘Sherlock Holmes’ series.

While toddling through the flea-market recently, I came across a real blast from the past, a gentlemens’ bathroom accessory that went out the window in the mid 20th century along with the straight-razor, strop, hone and probably Brilliantine as well. It had been something that I’d been after for a couple of months, and at the pittance of $10, I bought it. What was it? Have a look below…

How many things here could you identify?

Badger-hair shaving-brush? Check.
Proraso shaving-soap in a round, white plastic tub? Check.
Three-piece, double-edged razor and blade? Check.
Little white ceramic spoon for measuring Proraso shaving-soap in a round, white plastic tub? Check.

But then your eye might be drawn to the weird, juggymuggy thing hanging around in the background…the hell is that?

Unless you’re a wetshaver like I am, you’ve probably never seen one or knew they existed or knew what they’re called! But of course, if you use pressurised shaving-cream and a Mach5 razor or one of those vibrating electric ones, you wouldn’t need one of these archaic doowhackies, would you?

For $10, that is officially my cheapest single shaving-accessory purchase. If you’ve never seen one before, it’s called a shaving-scuttle. Cute, huh?

This thing is so unique and whimsical these days, that I thought I should do a little writeup about it.

What is a Shaving-Scuttle?

A shaving-scuttle is a mix between a jug, a mug and a scuttle and their original purpose was to provide the shaver with a ready supply of hot water. When they were invented in the second half of the 19th century, running hot water was a luxury that few people could afford. The man of the house would fill up his shaving-scuttle with boiling water from the kettle on the kitchen stove and carry it back to his washstand or bathroom to commence the day’s shaving. Hot water is an essential in traditional shaving because it relaxes the face and pores and softens up your stubble, making it easier to shave off.

How it was Used

Once the scuttle was full of water, the shaving-brush was shoved into it, through the spout…

…the purpose of this was to warm up the brush, soften it and let it retain some water for the task ahead, which was to work up a lather on the block of hard shaving-soap that would traditionally have sat in the circular bowl or well in the top of the scuttle. In the photo above, you might see a series of holes in the well of the scuttle. Those were there to drain away any excess water used in the lathering process. Unwanted water simply dribbled back into the main, lower chamber of the scuttle, keeping neatly out of the way. With the brush lathered up, the shaver could then create a nice smooth lather, either directly to his face or in a mixing-bowl.


A scuttle with a block or ‘puck’ of hard shaving-soap in the scuttle-well at the top. This is how they were traditionally used

Using a Shaving Scuttle Today

With the steady increase of access to running hot water, the necessity for the shaving-scuttle died away as the 20th century progressed. That said, some people still make shaving-scuttles, out of either clay (which is what mine is made of) or pewter, and some people, like me, still use scuttles. You can use them the old-fashioned way with blocks of hard soap (which are still manufactured and can be purchased at a good bodycare shop or online) or you can do what I do, and use them with softer shaving-soap like Proraso.

I’ve had a lot of people say things like:

“Oh you can’t do that, the bowl at the top is too small…”
“The hot water will heat the scuttle up too much and turn your soap to mush”.
“The soap will dribble through the drainage-holes. It won’t work!”

Well amazingly enough…they’ve all been wrong. After a bit of experimenting, I’ve concluded that you can actually mix up a great lather in the bowl of a shaving-scuttle, in spite of the drainage-holes in the way. In fact I find that the drainage-holes help! They drain away any excess water that might get the soap too sloppy and slippery, but on the other hand, it only takes a slight tilt of the scuttle to let water dribble into the bowl through the drainage-holes in reverse, to add extra water, if your soap is too dry. Being able to regulate the amount of water like this makes it so much easier to mix up a nice lather using a scuttle than a conventional mixing-bowl.

Some would say that no matter what I say or what others might think, the scuttle is obsolete and little more than a novelty item today. But even if the scuttle is just a cutesy little bathroom trinket, a souvenier and leftover from the Victorian age, it has one nice feature – it helps you save water, since you only need a minimal amount of hot/warm water to soak your brush in the scuttle and to mix up your lather!

And the scuttle can serve as a curious, noodle-scratching display-piece for relations to puzzle over when they come to visit, and see this weird, whacky thing sitting on your bathroom counter, if it does nothing else at all.

 
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Ars Gratia Artis: The History of Animated Cartoons

‘Toons. Cartoons. Animated films. Bah! Kids’ stuff!

And perhaps you may be right. These days, cartoons have a distinct, childish look and feel to them. When someone mentions cartoons, we think of the kids sitting in front of the television on Saturday mornings watching “Cartoon Network”, “Nickelodeon” or the “Disney Channel”. But cartoons have had a longer and more colourful history than most of us are probably aware of. Characters such as Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Popeye the Sailor Man, Goofy, Pete, Koko the Clown, Pluto, Tweety-bird, Daffy Duck and dozens of others, have histories stretching back well over fifty, sixty, seventy and in rare cases, eighty years! When and where did cartoons come from? How were they created? Who did what, when and how?

For the purposes of clarification, this article will cover the history of cartoons in the context of animated film, not as the funny pages in your local paper. So grab some popcorn, your best ACME-brand director’s chair, sit down and relax…

The First Animated Cartoons

Ever since the dawn of photography, people learned that pictures taken in quick sucession, of a moving object, could be flipped through, sequentially, to create the illusion of a ‘moving picture’. This became the basis of moving pictures of all kinds for over a hundred years, from the 1870s until the late 1990s, when it was gradually made obsolete by computer and filmmaking-technology that was more up-to-date.

People reasoned that, if dozens of photographs taken in quick sucession could be ‘played back’ as a ‘moving picture’, then there was no reason why a series of carefully-drawn illustrations couldn’t do the same thing. The first experiments with this took place in the late 19th century and the results were short animated cartoons created through ‘flip-books’. A flip-book worked by holding a small book (with the illustrations inside) spine upwards and then letting the pages fall downwards in front of you. As the pages fell and revealed the next frame in the animation, the pictures appeared to ‘move’.

The Development of Animated Film

Animated cartoon-films as we know and love them today, were born in the early 20th century, with companies and film-studios such as Inkwell Studios, the later Fleischer Studios, Warner Bros. Studios and most famously, the Walt Disney Studios and the less well-known Van Beuren Studios, all founded in the first few decades of the 20th century.

Since cartoons exist outside the world of conventional physics, science, medicine and technology and are created in a world entirely of their own, animators, illustrators, directors, producers and voice-actors of animated films soon realised that they could bend reality to extraordinary levels and thereby create amazingly vivid, surrealist and imaginative films which, in turn, allowed for a great deal of liberty and creativity in making comedy cartoon-shorts, something which the early animation studios produced a great deal of.

Cartoons started off looking very crude as animators originally struggled to draw such detailed drawings in great number. The cartoon tradition of having characters drawn with only four fingers and four toes was supposedly a time-saving measure. By having only four digits on the hands and feet, animators could draw more quickly, but at the same time, not appear to have greatly mutilated the limbs of the characters being used. This tradition of four-fingered characters has continued into the modern day with cartoons such as “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy”.

Talkie-Toonies

In the late 1920s, with the invention of films with synchronised audio (the “talkies”), animation studios began to explore with sound-effects, vocal-talents and music for their cartoons, to liven them up and add to the comedy in an audiable as well as visual way. Famous voice-actors of the “Golden Age of Animated Cartoons” included Walt Disney (Mickey Mouse), Mae Questal (Betty Boop, Olive Oyl) and Clarence Nash (who did Donald Duck’s famous raspy duck-voice). The famous Disney cartoon-short, “Steamboat Willie”, starring Mickey Mouse, Pete and Minnie Mouse was famous for being the first animated cartoon with complete post-production audio (music, dialogue and sound-effects) to be screened to the public.

Cartoon Music

With the creation and perfection of synchronised audio for animated films, animation-studios began experimenting with other additions to their cartoon-shorts to make them as humorous as possible. The next logical step after dialogue was the inclusion of music. From the earliest cartoons with sound, animators started including popular songs from the day or popular folk-songs. In “Steamboat Willie”, Mickey and Minnie Mouse play a goat as a phonograph which plays the song “Turkey in the Straw”. The 1930s Van Beuren ‘Tom and Jerry’ short “Piano Tooners” included notable songs such as “Margie” (in the opening credits), “Daisy Bell” (at the 1:50 mark) and later on, “Doin’ the New Low Down”, which was a popular jazz-song published in 1928, which would’ve been a very contemporary piece of music to include in a cartoon released in 1932.

Other popular songs used in cartoons included “Happy Days Are Here Again”, “Kitten on the Keys”, “Manhattan Serenade” (in the MGM short “Mouse in Manhattan”) and a selection of turn-of-the-century Vaudeville songs, such as those used in the Disney short “The Nifty Ninties” (that’s the 1890s, folks).

The most famous piece of cartoon music is probably the Warner Bros. Studio’s adaptation of Raymond Scott’s famous composition: “Powerhouse”, published in 1937, whose slow, rhythmic melody was used in several “production-line” sequences in numerous cartoons.

For curious minds, the theme tune for the Warner Bros. cartoon-shorts series “Looney Toons” was “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down”, the theme-tune for “Merrie Melodies” was “Merrily We Roll Along”.

Colour Cartoons

Colour still-photograhy became a reality in the 1860s, believe it or not and probably equally unbelievable was the fact that colour film technology was born as equally early in the motion-picture industry as it was in the photography industry. Using the famous ‘Technicolor’ film system, cartoons (and live-action films) were, for the first time, shot in full colour.

Technicolour had been available from the early 1920s, but due to the expensive nature of shooting a film in colour, before the development of synchronised sound to make the expense worthwhile, most film-studios (animated or otherwise), never bothered with it and through the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s (mostly due to the Depression), popular cartoons such as Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, Tom and Jerry and the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, remained black and white as a cost-cutting measure.

Starting in the second half of the 1930s, though, with the Depression slowly beginning to ease up, animation studios began experimenting with colourised, audio-synced cartoons, to great effect. The Disney “Silly Symphonies” cartoons of the late 1930s showed the quality of early Technicolor technology which was a great change from the greyscale black-and-white cartoons of only a couple of years previously. Technicolor, famous for its saturated tones, gave cartoons new life and provided animators with even greater comedic clay to craft into something even funnier and more memorable than before.

Viewing Cartoons

Before the rise of television in the 1950s, cartoon-shorts and obviously, full-length feature-animations, were screened in cinemas. If you’ve ever wondered why old cartoons from the 30s, 40s and 50s looked like they were treated as miniature films, with credits telling folks who was the director, producer, composer of the music and who did all the voice-acting, it’s because they were films which were showed in cinemas, along with conventional live-action films. This trend stopped in the 60s, though, with the rise of television, and with cartoons being delegated to the slot of Saturday-morning entertainment for the kids. But before then, making cartoons to be shown in cinemas was big business and the people who made them took a lot of pride and care in their work and craft. Naturally, they wanted to be properly credited for their part in their final masterpiece!

“Yeah but cartoons are computer-generated. You have the software and the graphics and the motion-capture and the…pfft”.

Making cartoons wasn’t always as easy as fiddling around with a mouse to create graphics on a computer-screen. In fact, it wasn’t until very recently that the first entirely CGI (Computer-Generated-Imagery) animated film was created…Disney-Pixar’s “Toy Story” in 1995. Before then, cartoons were still done the old-fashioned way and while CGI had been around since the early 1970s and had helped animators take a few shortcuts…before then, things were a lot different.


Walt Disney sketching out Mickey Mouse as he appeared in “Steamboat Willie” in 1928

Handcrafted Fantasies

In the days before computer graphics, before photoshop, before CGI, before computer-editing and all the rest of it, cartoon-films were made an entirely different way to how they are now. To begin with…they were all made by hand. Literally.

Today it’s impossible to imagine the level of skill, patience, dexterity, patience, care, patience, talent, patience, perseverence, patience, attention-to-detail, patience and time (did I mention ‘patience’?) that it took to create an animated film. It was an incredible artform where screwing up literally sent you back to the drawing-board. To work in an animation studio, you needed incredible patience. As Mel Blanc said, in an interview with David Letterman:

    “…To make a six-and-a-half minute cartoon in full animation, took a hundred and twenty-five people nine months; to make one fully-animated cartoon. And even then, it cost around $50,000…”

    – Voice-actor Mel Blanc (“The Man of A Thousand Voices”)

So, just how hard was it to make a cartoon the old-fashioned way? How was it done? Who did what? When? Why?

Storyboards

The first step in animation was drawing a storyboard. A storyboard is a rough series of sequential drawings, set out a bit like a comic-strip. The storyboard tells people what’s happening in the cartoon in a basic, easy-to-understand manner. It’s like a visual representation of a film-script. Anyone who’s seen storyboards of animated films will know just how quickly and crudely they’re drawn, often just with pencil or ink in a simple, sketchy, black-and-white way without any colours, with little captions under each picture to explain what’s happening in each frame.

Voice-Acting

With the basics of the cartoon illustrated on the storyboard, it’s time to put sound to pictures. Believe it or not, but in animated films, the soundtrack (the music, the sound-effects and the dialogue) is all done first, before the actual animation. The reason for this is so that the animators can draw and custom-fit their animation-cells AROUND the soundtrack and better synchronise the sounds with the pictures, actions and the lip-movements depicted on-screen. Doing it the other way would have the soundtrack fighting to keep up with the actions on-screen instead of having the animators “tailor-make” the pictures to go with the sound.

It’s during the recording process that the voices for the characters, the sound-effects for the actions and the music for the film are created. Voice-actors such as Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson, Nelson Muntz, Ralph Wiggum) and Mel Blanc (Yosemite Sam, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig) have often said that creating a voice for a character in a cartoon was not about making up a voice and then trying to figure out a character from the voice, but rather being given a picture of the cartoon-character and then deciding what kind of voice the character should have, based on the picture and a short description.

Reeling it In

With the storyboard drawn up, the voices, sounds and music recorded and spaced out and the characters created, it’s time to string the whole thing together. Obviously, perfectly synchronising movement with sound is an amazingly tricky process (which is why the first ‘talkie’ didn’t come out until 1927!), and to help them do this, animators create what is known as a story-reel.

The story-reel plays the cartoon, frame by frame along with the soundtrack, with all the frames drawn roughly as a draft for the final product. It’s during this process that any problems with synchronisation, lip-movements and timing between the movements on-screen and the audio, are fixed up. Getting the initial ‘meshing’ of the sound and movement perfect at this stage of the filmmaking process is important because, as animation is obviously a very expensive business (don’t forget, $50,000 for a six minute cartoon!), the animators and the studio cannot afford mistakes in the audio-synchronisation later on in the production process, when the film is almost complete. Doing it now when the drawings are still crude saves a lot of money in buying aspirin-tablets for folks later on.

Timing it Out

The next stage in traditional animation was design and timing. ‘Design’ was taking the storyboard and the story-reel and the pictures of all the things that would be in the cartoon, and drawing them out professionally, removing the rough edges and making it appear like a real cartoon. ‘Timing’ is making sure that all the problems with audio-synchronisation are removed and that the film runs and sounds flawlessly. Small details such as lip-synchronisation and music-synchronisation are touched up at this point.

The Layout

With the pictures being finalised and the audio properly synchronised, it’s time to organise the layout of the film. This includes camera-angles (how the camera is positioned) the camera-paths (how the cameras move) and the lighting…whether a scene will be bright, dark, done in half-light, shadow and so-on.

Animaniacs!

With the sound synced to the story-reel, it’s time for the animation. Animation is the process of making the characters and objects in the cartoon…move! It’s not as easy as you might think. It takes animators a very long time to do this professionally, since animation is done by hand. At the drawing-board, the animator starts drawing out the frames, one by one, illustrating them, colouring them in and making sure that they’re perfect. Traditional animation of this sort is called “cel animation” or “hand-drawn animation”. What’s ‘cel’?

‘Cel’ is short for ‘Celluloid’. Traditionally, the animation-frames were drawn out on clear, transparent sheets of celluloid plastic, from which this process gets its name. Cels are illustrated with the scene and the characters and objects and the cel is then coloured in using acrylic paints. Cel animation is no-longer used in big-budget cartoon movies (the Walt Disney Company stopped that in 1990) and original, framed animation-cels of famous characters or cartoons from the Golden Age of Animated Film, are big, big, BIG collectables, often fetching thousands of dollars at auctions. However, at this stage in the animation-process, cels don’t come into the picture yet. It’s still all done on paper.

Animation takes a considerable time. Apart from the characters moving and running around, apart from the drawing and the colouring and drawing the backgrounds to match movements and making sure it all matches PERFECTLY with the soundtrack, you also have to think of other aspects of the film. What about effects such as…fire? Wind? Rain? Weather? These are separate parts of the animation process which are handled by folks called…appropriately: “Effects animators”, whose job it is to fill in and animate all the parts of the film which are not either objects (vehicles, machinery, etc) or characters moving around. Once this is all done, can it be considered complete…after repeated touch-ups, examinations and careful screening, probing and analysis by the big bosses.

Ink!…Paint!…Camera!

With the hand-drawn animations finally completed, it’s time to turn the paper sheets and sketches and drawings into something which you can actually watch on a screen! Now of course…If you shined a projector-light onto a piece of paper, it wouldn’t work. The paper would block the image drawn on it and it wouldn’t appear on a screen because paper isn’t transparent. To overcome this problem, the final stage of the animation-process is the inking and painting.

In this step of the filmmaking process, the animated drawings are traced, copied and painted onto cels (remember those? The plastic sheets?). Since the cels are…celluloid, and are smooth and made of plastic, pencil-graphite and fountain-pen ink won’t stick to it. Instead, thicker inks and acrylic paints are used to draw and colour in each frame of the film.

With the transfer-process done, the film is now ready for photography, where it is filmed by special animation-cameras and lights are used to determine how bright or dark each frame of the film should be. Once all the cels have been photographed by the animation-camera, it’s transformed into film, where it can be mass-produced, ready for release to the public and screening in cinemas around the world!

This is where traditional, hand-drawn animation ends. These days, cels are no-longer used. The inking and painting of the drawings is done electronically after the sketches are scanned onto a computer, and are coloured in using the appropriate animation software. But, from the dawn of animated films in the 1920s, until computers started taking over in the 1970s…every single cartoon you watched, whether it was a ten-minute short or a two-hour feature-film extravaganza, was painstakingly sketched, recorded, transferred, inked, painted and photographed entirely by hand…exactly as described above.

Cartoons and the Modern World

A lot of things have changed since the first cartoons hit the screens of movie-theatres back in the 1920s, with all their flickering, black-and-white animated glory. One of the main things that has changed is the content and acceptability of what’s shown or not shown on cartoons and what is, and isn’t, what can and cannot, be shown to children.

Censorship and Political Correctness

Due to their free-reign of creativity and imagination, cartoons have long been attacked by political-correctness gurus and censorship hounds. Cartoons filmed in the 20s, 30s and 40s are altered, cut, censored or otherwise changed from their original state to something “suitable for the kiddies to watch”. Scenes depicting violence, sexual references (Yes! Even in cartoons!), racism, animal cruelty and warfare are often edited, changed or removed altogether.

“Mammy Two Shoes”, the obese, African-American housekeeper who looked after the house where Tom the Cat and Jerry the Mouse live, is one famous victim of modern cartoon-censorship, with her appearance, voice and mannerisms being changed to reflect a more politically correct view, by having a slim, white teenage girl replace her in some scenes.

Scenes in Betty Boop cartoons which depict legs, arms, breasts, which hint at rape, sexual-assault and racism were also heavily censored in later years and some cartoons were even banned from being shown at all!

Warner Bros’ famous cartoon character, “Speedy Gonzales”, the fastest mouse in Mexico, was also subjected to heavy censorship…until Mexican-Americans had to stand up and state flatly that they didn’t find the cartoons offensive and that they remembered them fondly from their childhoods.

These, and other countless examples of censorship and political correctness affecting classic cartoons have been dominating much of peoples’ enjoyment of these entertainment classics in the late 20th and early 21st century. Many people feel that the censorship is uncalled for and unecessary and that the political correctness is overboard. The cartoons should be viewed with the context in which they were produced, 60, 70 or even 80 years ago, and should not be measured by modern standards of society and acceptability.

Famous Cartoon Characters

Cartoons aren’t just about the whacky sounds, the funny things you see, the music or the great illustrations…it’s about…the characters! And what characters! Some of them have remained famous to this day, even though they’re up to eighty years old! So who are they?

Mickey Mouse


Mickey Mouse looking very smart in his white tie and tails, from the 1947 short “Mickey’s Delayed Date”

Created by Walt Disney in 1928, Mickey Mouse is King of Animated Characters! Funny, charming, witty, amazingly sweet and adorable to look at in any context! Mickey Mouse was born out of Disney’s desire to create a different kind of cartoon character. Instead of cats or dogs or people, Disney wanted to draw something really unique. He took his inspiration for Mickey from the bog-standard cartoon mouse of the period, with large, black ears, big eyes, a round body and large feet.

Disney fleshed out the character from a simple, nondescript mouse into a screen legend. Mickey was famous for a lot of things, such as appearing in the first cartoon with complete sound, for popularising white gloves and for his catchphrase “Ooooh boy!”.

Mickey’s voice was deliberately high-pitched to match his size and species, but still distinctly male in tone. So far, Mickey has been voiced by four people over the years:

– Walt Disney himself (1928-1947).
– Jimmy MacDonald (1947-1977).
– Wayne Allwine (1977-2009)…Allwine died from diabetes in 2009, and was replaced by…
– Bret Iwan, who is the current voice of Mickey Mouse, and who has been voicing him since Allwine’s death in 2009.

Mickey’s use of white gloves on his paws (which has since become a rather common sight in animated animal cartoons) was so that audiences could distinguish between Mickey’s paws and the rest of his body (since both were black), so that viewers could tell where his hands were when they were placed against dark backgrounds.

Minnie Mouse

Created in 1928, Minnie was originally an unnamed Disney cartoon mouse, but as the months progressed, she was eventually established as Mickey’s girlfriend by mid 1929. Minnie has been voiced by no less than seven voice-actors over the past eighty-odd years, ranging from Walt Disney himself, to Mae Questal (more famous for voicing Betty Boop) and currently, Russi Taylor, who has provided her voice since 1986, and continues to do so.

As Mickey’s girlfriend, Minnie made several appearances on-screen, either as Mickey’s girlfriend, or as an unnamed female mouse as a partner for Mickey. In early cartoon shorts from the 1920s and 30s, it was a common joke that Minnie’s skirt would flap up or be blown up, showing off her undergarments, just one of the several things that was changed in the mid 1930s with increasingly tight censorship standards, enforced by the Hays Code of 1934.

Donald Duck

Famous for his raspy voice, clumbsiness and incredibly short temper, Donald Duck has been one of Disney’s greatest creations, since he first appeared in 1934. Donald’s distinct, raspy duck-voice was skillfully provided by Clarence Nash from 1934, right up until 1985, when he died of lukemia, aged 80. Since 1985, Donald Duck has been voiced by the equally-talented Tony Anselmo.

In the 1940s, Donald Duck starred in several WWII propaganda films, most famous of these was probably “Der Fuhrer’s Face”.

Donald Duck’s biggest claim to fame is probably his incredibly large extended family, something which not many other cartoon characters had. Apart from Donald, Disney also created…

Scrooge McDuck (named after Ebeneezer Scrooge), who is voiced by Alan Young, who is Donald’s exceedingly wealthy Scottish uncle.

Huey, Dewey and Louie, Donald’s three, mischievious nephews, who first appeared on film in “Donald’s Nephews” in 1938.

Grandma Duck, Donald’s grandmother, and…

Gus Goose, Donald’s cousin Gus…a goose…with an enormous appetite who causes him all kinds of strife in the short film “Donald’s Cousin Gus” (1939).

Daisy Duck, created in 1940, although not part of the Duck family, nonetheless made several appearances in cartoons of the 1940s and 50s as Donald’s longsuffering girlfriend.

Goofy

Goofy Goof was created in 1932 and he, Mickey and Donald appeared in several successful and highly humorous cartoons during the 1930s and 40s. Goofy is famous for being rather dim, making mistakes and several blunders and also for his distinctive chuckle (“Aaah-hyuk!”) and his catchphrase “Gawrsh!” (“Gosh!).

In later, TV cartoons, Goofy has a son, Max, although Goofy’s wife is never identified. Television cartoons of the 1990s often had comedy coming from Goofy struggling to raise his troublesome son, who was often portrayed as a difficult teenager. Max Goof has the distinction of being one of the few Disney cartoon characters who has actually aged in real-time.

In some cartoons from the 40s and 50s, Goof was often used as an ‘everyman character’, to be a representative of the common working man. In these shorts, his name was often given as “George Geef”.

Betty Boop

Created by an animator working for Fleischer Studios in 1930, Betty Boop has remained one of the most famous and popular cartoon characters of all time. I won’t mention her in this article, since she already has her own article.

Bugs Bunny

“Eeeeeeeh…what’s up, dawc?”


Bugs looking smart in his white-tie tux

Created in 1937, Bugs Bunny is Warner Bros’. most famous cartoon character ever. He made his official screen debut as Bugs in 1940 and was voiced, originally, by the highly talented Mel Blanc. Bugs’ cartoons often depicted him being a source of trouble for either Daffy Duck or the hunter, Elmer Fudd. When voicing Bugs, Blanc blended the Brooklyn and Bronx accents of the American Eastern Seaboard to try and come up with the ultimate, tough-guy, wise-cracking voice for this new cartoon character, which had been described to him as such, by the Warner Bros. studio executives.

One big challenge for Blanc was recording Bugs’s catchphrase: “Eeeeh…what’s up, doc?”. The words weren’t the hard part. What Blanc found difficult was having to crunch on an actual carrot and to chew it to produce the proper sound-effect for just before Bugs speaks. The problem was that Blanc hated carrots! In the end, he reached a compromise with the recording-crew, whereby he crunched on the carrot, stopped the recording, spat the carrot out and then continued with the rest of the catchphrase!

Bugs’s fame skyrocketed during WWII. His easygoing nature and casual speech made him popular as a screen-star and several propaganda films were created with him as the main character between 1942-1945.

Tom and Jerry

Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse were two famous cartoon characters who originally starred in a series of highly successful shorts from 1940-1958 created by the animation department of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Like several cartoon characters of the period, they used exaggerated cartoon violence to incredible and hilarious effect and the original series of cartoons was only stopped because MGM closed its animation department in 1958.

Tom and Jerry returned in 1962 in even more series of cartoon-shorts, which were shown on television, and there continue to be revisions of the comic duo right up to the 21st century.

Less well-known Characters

Not all characters were amazingly famous, though. How many of these can you remember?

Clarabelle Cow? Horace Horsecollar? How about Private Snafu?

Clarabelle and Horace were both Disney cartoon characters, although not as well known as some of the others. A full cast of classic Disney characters can be seen in the immensely funny cartoon-short “Symphony Hour” (1942).

Private Snafu was created in the 1940s to star in a series of educational cartoons for the US. Army. Given the intended audience of the Snafu shorts would be young men going into armed services, Snafu cartoon-shorts were a bit more raunchy and politically incorrect than other cartoons of the period. Snafu’s name comes from the army acronym: “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up”, although this was changed to ‘Fouled Up’ in the cartoons. In the later war years, of 1944 and 1945, SNAFU was supposed to be teamed up with his brothers, ‘Tarfu’ (Things Are Really Fucked Up) and ‘Fubar’ (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair), in additional series of educational cartoons for the Air-Force, Marines and Navy, however, the war ended before these series could begin (save for one lone Tarfu cartoon)…which was probably just as well for the censorship department!

That’s All, Folks!

Well, this concludes my little writeup on the history of classic, animated cartoons. So, as Porky Pig says:

“Th-th-that’s a…that’s…that’s all, folks!”

If you want to see classic Disney, MGM or Warner Bros. cartoons (such as Tom & Jerry, Betty Boop, Snafu or Mickey Mouse), dozens of them are available for viewing on YouTube.com.

 
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The Final Solution: The Holocaust and Jewish Persecution during the Nazi Regime

This article concerns an extremely upsetting and disturbing time in human history and may contain graphic photographs and images. Persons offended by such material are advised not to read it.

The Final Solution. The Holocaust. The Shoah. The period of twelve years from 1933 until 1945, that European Jews were hunted, persecuted, slaughtered, tortured and massacred by the German Nazi Party and by their various collaborators. This article charts the progress of Jewish persecution by the Nazis and their allies and collaborators from the rise of the Nazis in 1933 under Adolf Hitler, until the end of the Second World War in Europe on the 8th of May, 1945.

The Holocaust was, is and will forever be, one of the most shocking examples of human degradation ever to darken the face of the earth; up there with the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il and North Korea, Stalinist Russia and the Cold War. This article will show the progression of the Holocaust from a small, irritating little prickle, into the fiery hell that it escalated to in the early 1940s; from simple, anti-semitic beginnings to the popular, Hollywood and pop-culture image of it, as portrayed in films and on television.

Why the Jews?

Of all the peoples throughout history, few have been more chased, hunted and persecuted than those who follow the Jewish faith. Why?

Jews were persecuted for various reasons, but mostly due to their significantly different beliefs and customs to those who followed the Christian faith. Jews followed different customs and practiced different beliefs and traditions to Christians. Jews formed their own communities (ghettos) inside larger communities, a bit like Chinatowns or Little Italys. The Jews kept to themselves and mingled in and amongst themselves. This show of apparent isolationism bred contempt and suspicion from non-Jewish people who accused them of almost anything, when there was any accusing to be done. In the 14th Century, for example, when the Black Death ripped through Europe, frantic and horrified peasants, desperate for answers, lunged at rumors that Jews poisoned wells and that this poison spread the Plague. It wasn’t true, of course, but when mass-hysteria grabs hold, there’s very little to hold it back.

Such was the case with the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s.

The seeds of the Nazi Holocaust were sewn in the mid 1920s and the 1930s. Germany, crushed and humiliated after losing the Great War of 1914-1918, had been ripped to pieces. Its land had been cut up, its military forces had been ripped to shreds and all its finest ocean-liners were sold off to the Allies to pay for war-damages. Furious and downhearted, Germans found comfort in the belief that it was the Jews who “stabbed Germany in the back”. The stab-in-the-back theory of anti-semitism made Germans feel better about themselves, and this set the ball rolling for the Nazis, who were, in the 1920s, a small, insignificant political party. Anti-semitism grew in the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s with the German Hyperinflation Crisis of 1922. In order to pay off massive debts incurred by the First World War, thousands of German marks were printed. This influx of currency reduced the value of the Mark until it was literally worthless. The Depression that came less than ten years later, secured Hitler’s rise to power and the start of a systematic program of anti-Jewish measures.

Pre-War Persecution

To many people, the Holocaust and Jewish persecution started in 1939, with the declaration of war, by the United Kingdom and France, upon Germany. However, what people may not be aware of is the fact that German persecution of Jews started significantly earlier than that.

Anti-Jewish laws and regulations were brought into Germany along with the Nazis in 1933. At first, the laws and regulations started out small…here are a few…

1933

7th April…

– Jews barred from civil service in Germany.
– Jews barred from becoming practicing lawyers.

25th April…

– Jews barred from German universities.

1934

– Jews excluded from serving in the German military.

1935-1936

– ‘Mixed marriages’ between Aryans and Jews are forbidden.
– Jews lose the Vote.
– Jews lose German citizenship.
– Jews banned from entering or using public places (restaurants, swimming-pools, public parks).
– Jews no-longer allowed to own…bicycles, typewriters, records and phonographs.
– Jewish travel restrictions began.

It was around this time that many German Jews started trying to leave Germany. The smart ones took trains north or west, to England or France and boarded ocean-liners, either to the United Kingdom or across the Atlantic, to the United States. Firm anti-Jewish immigration laws, however, only allowed so many hundreds of Jews to immigrate to these places each year. Many just moved across the border to France, Poland or other neighbouring countries, which would soon be swallowed up by the Nazis.

1937-1938

– Jews excluded from cinemas, theatres, concert-performances, public beaches and holiday resorts.
– Jewish children are expelled from schools and forced to attend “Jewish schools” instead.
– Jews have their passports marked with a “J” (for ‘Jude’, the German for ‘Jew’), to identify them when they travel.

In 1939, with the invasion of Poland by the German Army, the Allies, who had sat back for long enough without doing anything, finally started waking up to the fact that Hitler would not stop wanting to grab more and more land. On the 3rd of September, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. For the Jews, now living in a country at war, life became even harder. Stricter and tighter rules were put in place. Amongst these, were…

– Jews could not own radios.
– Jews had to abide by a curfew.
– Jews could not own telephones.
– Jews were forcibly evicted from their houses without reason or notice (this was provide homes for Germans whose homes had been bombed by the Allies).
– Jews forbidden to leave the country.
– Jews forbidden pets.

And then, from 1941 onwards, the most famous of all Anti-Jewish measures was made law.

– All Jews over the age of six years old must wear a yellow Star of David, with ‘Jude’ written on it.

The YELLOW Star of David was not universal, however. In Poland, for example, the Star was blue with a white background. This is what they looked like…


A Polish blue & white Star of David armband


A German yellow-and-black Star of David badge, with ‘Jude’ written on it

The Polish armbands had to be worn on the right sleeve of the outermost garment that a person wore; the yellow badge had to be sewn onto the front of the person’s clothing, to clearly identify them as Jews.

Escaping the Nazis

Before the War, escaping persecution was tricky. Jews could only travel to certain countries, in certain numbers, at certain times of the year. However, when the Second World War started, escaping from Nazi tyranny became almost impossible. It wasn’t just a matter of getting in a car or on a train or hotfooting it across the countryside. Oh no. Jews had to pass checkpoints, border-patrols and Military Police. To do this safely, they required the necessary travel-documents, which were not easy to obtain. Many Jews were aided in their escapes by various resistence and underground groups and organisations, from the German Resistence, the French Resistence, Partisan groups and the Danish Resistence. Countries such as Sweden, Denmark and England were the most instrumental in helping Jews escape.

Due to Denmark’s importance to the German war-machine; providing ports, providing food and drink and other vital wartime necessities, the Germans more or less left Denmark to its own devices (so to speak) after the German Army came in and steamrollered everything. This made the Danish Resistence all the stronger to fight and better enabled them to help Jews, who they smuggled from Denmark to Sweden (and thence to England) by cargo-ships which sailed the North Sea regularly to deliver vital German war-supplies.

Going into Hiding

For those who could not contact Resistence Movements, for those who could not escape from the Nazis on their own, they had no choice but to either wait around and be arrested and rounded up and dragged off to God-knows-where…or they had to go into hiding.

To go into hiding was an ambitious and scary thing to do, as evidenced by the most famous example of this: The Frank Family in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Going into hiding wasn’t just a matter of pretending you weren’t home. It meant pretending you didn’t exist at all. You had to disappear competely from society. Many Jews were aided in their hidings by sympathetic (and incredibly brave!) non-Jewish friends, who sheltered them and provided them with food, drink, clothing and other necessities. Resistence-movements also aided Jews who went into hiding, or who joined the Resistence to fight back against the Nazis. The Official Guiness World Record for the longest time spent living in an attic was set by a Jew who went into hiding there in the 1940s to escape from the Nazis and stayed up there for over fifty years!

Entering the Ghetto

One method which the Germans used to keep an eye on Jews was the creation of ghettos, or as Wladyslaw Szpilman referred to them, “Jewish Districts” (the Nazis’ words, not his). The ghettos were walled-off areas of town where the Jews were forced to live in so that the Nazis and their collaborators could keep an eye on them. Famous cities with ghettos included Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow in Poland, which held tens of thousands of Jews between them.

At first glance, you’re probably thinking that all this was rather jolly. Your own section in town to do whatever you liked in with nobody to bother you…Sit down, shut up and wait for the Tommies to come charging in on their DD tanks.

Right?

Wrong.

Ghettos were far from comfortable and far from luxurious and far from home…in fact they were as far from being the friendly, community area that you might think they were.

To start off with, food was far from plentiful. While transports of food, clothing and other necessities were allowed to be driven, carted or carried through the gates that led into the ghettos, there was never enough for everyone and throughout the years that the ghettos operated, there was a chronic shortage of essentials. And it wasn’t as easy as you might think, to get out of the ghetto to go and get more food. The walls that were built around all ghettos were topped with all kinds of nasty things, from barbed wire, sharp rocks and jagged pieces of smashed up glass, to cut up the hands of anyone brave or stupid enough to try and climb over them. But people still found ways. In the Warsaw Ghetto, for example, drainage-sluices had been made in the bottoms of some of the walls to allow rainwater to drain away so that the ghetto wouldn’t flood. The smallest of children used to slip through these holes and scurry off to find food in the dark of night.


Warsaw, Poland. August, 1940. Here, one of the walls is being built for the Warsaw Ghetto that would house the Jews living in, or coming to Warsaw

Apart from the shortages of food, there was also the constant threat of disease. The ghettos were ‘advertised’ as places of safety for the Jews where they could practice their Jewish ways and live their Jewish lives away from the pure-bred Aryans. But they were also there to prevent the spread of “Jewish diseases”, one of the most prominent of which was typhus.

Due to the significant lack of medical aid, medicine and surgeons and hospitals in the ghettos, epidemic diseases (such as typhus) were serious killers and hundreds of Jews died from outbreaks. Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Polish-Jewish pianist, wrote of how he used to go home from work each night in the ghetto. He had to be careful where he walked to prevent tripping over the corpses in the streets, which were there either from death from disease, starvation or rioting.

Life in the ghetto was far from easy. Raids by the Gestapo and military police were common and Jews could be dragged out of their houses and shot in the streets for absolutely no reason at all. And it wasn’t always the Gestapo who did it, either.

To maintain law and order in the ghettos, the Jewish Ghetto Police were created. They were there, on the surface, to protect the Jews and look after them…being Jews themselves. But being a ghetto policeman meant getting various priveliges such as more food, better clothes and more money. This could lead to serious corruption, and did, in many cases. Ghetto policemen aided the Gestapo in rounding up transports of Jews to be taken to the death-camps, with the provision that if they did so, their own families would not be hurt. Of course this was a load of bupkiss, the Germans didn’t give a damn either way. And there were stories of ghetto policemen being killed by fellow Jews in revenge on the train-rides to the extermination-camps.

Liquidation of ghettos started in about 1943 and every few days, more and more Jews were rounded up, driven to stations, dumped on trains and sent by rail to the various death-and-labour-camps around Poland and Germany. For many people, this would be the last train-ride they ever took.

Liquidation meant more than just carting people off to their doom, though. It also involved soldiers marching into the ghettos with machine-guns and flamethrowers to torch, shoot and destroy every single building and person that they could find. To protect themselves against this, many Jews went into hiding, even in the ghettos, creating hidey-holes and secret spaces where they could live. Other Jews managed to escape out of the ghetto and find help with sympathetic non-Jews, who helped them contact the various underground resistance-groups who housed them, hid them or recruited them into their anti-Nazi causes.

The Camps

One of the most enduring images of the Holocaust are the death camps. Names like Auschwitz I, Sobibor, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen. And of course, the most famous camp of all…

Auschwitz-Birkenau

The camps were combination slave-labour and extermination camps and millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, POWs and political prisoners were sent through their gates to come out as ashes or as skeletons. Life in these camps was horrific at the very best of times, with chronic shortages of food, warm clothing, medical care and almost everything else necessary for survival. Families were separated on arrival and the elderly, infirm and children were gassed almost the moment that they got off the trains, in massive gas-chambers, where they would be told that they were having a shower.

Those left alive were worked to death. They were housed in cramped, freezing, overcrowded and filthy barracks, as many as three or four people to a bunk, with no fires to keep them warm. Epidemics of typhus, typhoid and dysentery killed thousands and bodies were burned or buried as fast as possible, which was never fast enough.

Chances of survival were few in Auschwitz. In Poland, where winters sent temperatures plummeting solidly into the negative digits, many people died from hypothermia. One of the few places where one could be safe was in getting a job in the camp, either as a sonderkommando (who was a Jew assigned to help with the gas-chamber process, to remove bodies from the chambers after they were used) or to work in “Kanada”.

“Kanada” was the sorting-area of Auschwitz. Here, all the suitcases, steamer-trunks, gladstone-bags and handbags were sent and dumped, to be sorted through by the Jews (mostly women) who worked there. Working in Kanada was probably the safest job in Auschwitz: It meant better food, access to warm clothing, being kept indoors, away from rain and snow and it meant that you could keep (if you were crafty) any little trinkets that you found, and use them to bribe guards. One story tells of a woman who learned of her sister and her children arriving at Auschwitz. She begged a guard to bring them to Kanada. The guard intervened in the gas-chamber process and brought the woman’s sister to work with her in Kanada, ensuring their safety throughout their time there. The children, however, useless in Kanada or anywhere else in the camp, were sent to the gas-chambers. Later on, the woman spoke out in favour at the guard’s war-crimes trial to get him a lesser sentence.

The famous slogan on the gates of Auschwitz I; “Arbeit Macht Frei”, translated from German to English (literally) as: “Work Makes Free”, or more fluidly, “Work Makes You Free/Work Liberates”, is another symbol of the death-camps and the Holocaust which has never gone away. Even today, people still remember it…even if they don’t always remember what its significance is, such as the unfortunate Italian politician Tommaso Colleti .

People Associated with the Holocaust

The Holocaust brought out the best and worst in everyone. Some people became famous because they survived, some became famous for what they did, or what they did not do. Some became famous for providing incredible records of an amazing period in human history. Here are just a few of the more famous people associated with the Holocaust…

The Bielski Brothers (Tuvia, Asael, Alexander, Aron).

Four Jewish-Polish brothers who, after the deaths of their parents and other siblings at the hands of Nazi collaborators, formed the Bielski Otriad, a partisan group which lived in the forests of Belarus, hiding, housing and recruiting Jews and protecting them in camps made in the midst of the forests. They conducted geurilla raids on Nazi sympathisers, collaborators and military police, using stolen firearms, ranging from simple revolvers to shotguns and rifles. They lived in the forests from 1941 until liberation, saving 1,200 Jews. Tuvia and Alexander moved to the USA after the War and died in 1987 and 1994 respectively.

Their struggle was turned into a film (“Defiance”) starring Daniel Craig.

The Frank Family (Otto, Edith, Margot, Anne).

The Frank Family and four other people went into hiding in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 1942 to 1944. They were discovered in August of ’44 and sent to the camps. Of the eight people in the Secret Annex at the back of the building where they were hiding, only Otto survived. He published his daughter Anne’s diary and was instrumental in creating the world-famous Anne Frank museum. He died in 1980, aged 91.

Capt. Wilhelm Hosenfeld

A German army-officer who protected and aided Polish Jews (most notably, Wladyslaw Szpilman, the pianist). His private diary showed his disgust for the Holocaust and records his personal attempts to aid persecuted Jews. He was captured by the Red Army when the German Army retreated in 1944 and was held in a Prisoner of War camp. Despite efforts by all the people whom he rescued and protected, the Russians refused to release him and he died in the camp in 1952.

Oskar Schindler

A German industrialist and a member of the Nazi Party, Oskar Schindler is famous for saving over 1,000 of his Jewish factory-workers by writing up the now world-famous ‘Schindler’s List’. This list allowed hundreds of Jews to survive the war by being “essential workers” which were keeping the German war-effort going. Oskar Schindler died in 1974 at the age of 66. The Jews he saved are officially known as the Schindlerjuden (Schindler’s Jews). A film of his efforts, (“Schindler’s List”) was directed by Stephen Spielberg.

Wladyslaw Szpilman

A Polish-Jewish pianist who died in 2000 at the age of 88. He is famous for surviving the Warsaw Ghetto and for writing his memoir “The Pianist”, which was turned into a film by Roman Polanski. He was portrayed by Adrien Brody in the film.

 
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Oop-Boop-A-Doop! The History of Betty Boop

One of the most famous and iconic cartoon characters of the 20th century, up there with Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Bart Simpson and Peter Griffin (or not), Betty Boop hit the movie-screens of the world all of a sudden in the early 1930s, bringing untold joy and laughter to thousands of Americans who were out of work in the struggling times of the Great Depression. This article will explore the history of Betty Boop and what she meant to the world.

Made of Pen and Ink…

Betty Boop was created by animator Grim Natwick in 1930 as a character for the animated-film company Fleischer Studios (founded in 1921 as Inkwell Studios, reflecting the company’s area of production of animated films). She was originally a female cartoon dog (as in those furry things that go ‘woof!’), made to go with the cartoons then being produced and directed by brothers and company-founders Max and David Fleischer.

Betty Boop made her first appearance in the short film “Dizzy Dishes”, on the 9th of August, 1930. She had a more dog-like face, with long, flapping ears, to reflect her original role as an animal character in the studio’s line of films. Betty Boop was modelled after then-popular singer Helen Kane, whose distinctive scat-singing style gave rise to Betty’s well-known “Oop-boop-a-doop!” catchphrase. The fact that Kane was an inspiration for Betty was so well-known that in 1932, Helen Kane tried to sue Fleischer studios for the stupendous sum of $250,000! No that’s not a typo, that’s two hundred and fifty thousand dollars; an absolute fortune in the struggling, Depression-era years of the 1930s. Unfortunately for Kane, she wasn’t able to prove that her singing style was uniquely hers (other singers besides herself, who also sang in a similar ‘oop-boop-a-doop’ scat-style were brought forward as proof of this) and she was also unable to prove that her appearance had been copied by the artists at Fleischer studios (who had based Betty’s appearance on the likeness of equally-famous 1920s actress Clara Bow). Ultimately, Kane lost the lawsuit and Betty was here to stay.

Throughout the early years of the 30s, Betty’s appearance continued to change. Originally drawn as a dog, she eventually became more and more human until by 1932, Max Fleischer had decided to make her totally human. In keeping with 20s and 30s contemporary style, Betty was drawn up as a stylised flapper girl; a good dancer, young in appearance, innocent and with a short, above-knee length flapper dress. Her long, doggy ears became ordinary-sized ears, with large, hoop earrings.

…She can win you with a wink…

One of Betty’s biggest claims to fame was as one of the earliest known sex-symbols! Now I’m sure to many people today, the idea of getting your jollies on a hand-drawn, black-and-white ink-and-pen cartoon character sounds absolutely ludicrous! Betty surely had no more sex-appeal than Mickey Mouse! But therein lies the very reason. Betty wasn’t Mickey. Betty wasn’t an animal. She wasn’t a mouse. She was drawn as a person. As a human being. As…a woman.

Previous to Betty, all female characters were crudely drawn, basically looking like male cross-dressers. No thought was given to the female form…it wasn’t really seen as being necessary. But with Betty, that all changed. She was drawn with hips, breasts, big, batting eyes and a proper female figure, something which nobody had ever done before. This, combined with her (then) skimpy outfits, which showed off her arms and most of her legs, added to her sex-appeal.


Betty Boop, showing off her legs, shoulders and arms and sporting her signature hoop earrings

There was a great deal of sexual exploration in the 1920s and early 30s, with women dressing up in men’s clothing and men dressing up in clothing intended for females! Men tried on makeup and women smoked cigarettes, in a day and age when only men smoked! The popular song “Masculine Women, Feminine Men”, from 1926, shows that sexual exploration was nothing new in the 20s and 30s!

Because of all this, Fleischer studios were simply going with the times and decided to make a more overtly sexual character than had previously been allowed. Don’t forget that this was 1932; not too long before in the Victorian era, the mere glimpse of a woman’s arm or leg by anyone other than her husband or a medical doctor was considered scandalous!

Betty was also somewhat controversial because of her age. She is supposed to be only sixteen, although if you look at some cartoons, she does some very adult things such as running hotels and boarding-houses, and if you watch a few more cartoons, it’s implied that she is still a virgin and it’s been suggested that her ‘oop-boop-a-doop’ as a euphamistic nonsense term created to allude to her virginity.

…Ain’t She Cute?..

Betty was an instant screen sensation. Her popularity soared and she became famous the world-over. The Betty Boop cartoons had a cast of supporting characters which only added to the comedy and hilarity of all the insane and crazy situations that Betty found herself in. Most notably amongst these were Koko the Clown, a friendly, if clumbsy clown, Bimbo, a dog-like character and another one of Betty’s friends, and probably most famously, Professor Grampy, an eccentric, elderly inventor who helps Betty out of numerous jams. He was famous for his skittish dance and for putting on his thinking-cap (a mortarboard hat with a lightbulb on top) when trying to figure out solutions. The hat’s lightbulb would light up when he got an idea which invariably led him to jump up and cry out: “Haha! I’ve got it!”


Grampy with his thinking-cap on, hard at work

…Oop-boop-a-doop!..

Betty’s nonsense catchphrase, “Oop-Boop-A-Doop” was taken from the singing-style of Helen Kane, who was a popular 1920s vocalist, but probably more famous was Betty’s signature, high-pitched, teenage voice. This was provided by numerous voice-actors over the years, but Betty was most famously voiced by Mae Questel, who won the role of voicing Betty in a talent-contest when she was only seventeen, by imitating the singing-style of…you guessed it…Helen Kane!

From 1931 to 1939, Mae Questel voiced Betty in over 150 animated cartoon shorts, gaining worldwide fame as a voice-actress. Questel also voiced several other famous cartoon characters, including Casper the Friendly Ghost, Felix the Cat, Minnie Mouse and Olive Oyl, the longsuffering girlfriend of Popeye the Sailor.

Apart from voices, Betty’s cartoons were famous for including new and popular songs in their soundtracks, most notably, Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher”. Several short theme-songs were also written for the cartoon series. If you’ve been linking up all the subtitles in this article so far, you may have already figured out what one is.

Made of pen and ink,
She can win you with a wink,
Ain’t she cute?
Oop-Boop-A-Doop,
Sweet Betty!

That short ditty was played at the start of several of the Betty Boop shorts, occasionally substituted with this one:

She’s our little queen,
Of the animated screen,
Ain’t she cute?
Oop-boop-a-doop,
Sweet Betty!

A significantly longer theme-song went:

A hot cornet can go *wah-wah-wah!*
Playing hot and blue,
But a hot cornet can’t,
Oop-boop-a-doop,
Like Betty Boop can do!

A saxophone can go *doo-doo-doo*
Playing all night through!
But a saxophone can’t,
Oop-boop-a-doop,
Like Betty Boop can do!

This little miss,
Would never miss,
A chance for vocal tuning,
And anytime and anywhere,
You can hear this lady crooning!

An old banjo can go *plink-plink-plink*
That’s no news to you!
But an old banjo can’t,
Oop-boop-a-doop,
Like Betty Boop can do!

Sweet Betty!

For the past eighty years, Betty Boop remains one of the most famous and popular animated characters ever, with her distinctive voice, appearance and singing style. But Betty wasn’t always this sweet. While she was originally rather scantily clad, the Motion Picture Production Code (more famously known as the ‘Hays Code’, after the man who instituted it) put an end to all this. In the late 30s and into the 40s, Betty Boop’s figure had to be changed to meet the new, stricter censorship laws. Most notably amongst these changes was in Betty’s wardrobe. Betty’s dresses became less revealing, changing from the 1920s, sleeveless flapper dresses which showed off her legs from her knees down, to more conservative dressing which covered up her arms, back, shoulders and brought the hemline of her dress further down to below her knees.


This 1935 film-poster for a Betty Boop animated short, shows how the Hays Code affected Betty Boop’s appearance under the new censorship laws

Despite these changes though, Betty Boop has remained a popular and beloved character by thousands of people around the world.

 
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Daily Life in Medieval Europe

The Medieval Era of history is generally defined as being from 1066 to the early 1500s, from the Norman Conquest of England to the end of the Wars of the Roses in the 1480s. They’re also known as the “Middle Ages”. Middle of what? Between the Dark Ages and the Modern Era, of course! When people think of the Medieval era, they think of the Black Death, tunics, the church, knights in shining armour, good kings, good queens, evil kings and evil queens. Good-looking princes and glamorous princesses. We imagine quaint villages with thatched rooves and farms and fields and exciting village life.

But what was life like in the Middle Ages? It was certainly nowhere near as glamorous as many people might think from reading comic-books, watching movies or Monty Python. For many people, life was a daily struggle just to survive. Days were long, nights were cold, food was hard to come by and pleasures were few and far between.

Hatches, Matches and Despatches

Hatches…matches and despatches…births, marriages and deaths. The three basic stages of human life.

In the Middle Ages, the infant mortality rate was naturally high. The far-from-clean homes of the peasantry, the lack of modern medical care for the wealthy who could afford any kind of medical care, and a general lack of food meant that many children were lucky to survive their first few years on earth.

In an age before there were very many doctors around, births were usually aided with the help of this essential of Medieval society: The Midwife, whose job it was to help birth babies and bring them into the world. Of course, this wasn’t always easy. Any manner of complications could cause death: From deformities and birth-defects, later infections or the mother dying from postnatal complications.

Once born, however, a child was brought into the world as best as they could be. The children of wealthy families could expect to be raised by servants or a wet-nurse, to be pampered and babied to the point of spoilage. Children from poorer families had to rely on their parents or grandparents (if they were lucky enough to have any) to raise them. In a day and age where commoners worked from day to day to survive, children were seen, probably, as less of a joy, but more of a way to make more money. The moment they could, children were set to work in the fields or elsewhere, to earn money and food for the family. Children of all ages, from kids who had just learned how to walk, to teenagers, were expected to pull their weight and split firewood, plough fields, sow crops, harvest crops, store the grain, store firewood and help around the house. With so much work to do, you can imagine childhood obesity wasn’t a problem back then! One important aspect of birth in the Middle Ages was getting the child christened at the local church. Christening usually took place within a week of the child’s birth, where its name and date of birth might be recorded.

Once a child reached his or her teenage years, then the next stage of life came along: Marriage.

In the Medieval era, it could be fair to say that the main purpose of marriage was to advance one’s social-status, for advancing one’s social status was the only way to stave off the looming threat of death from starvation. Parents often got together to arrange marriages for their respective children, whether their children liked it or not. If the child managed to find a man or a woman who he or she actually loved, who also advanced the family’s social-status, then so much the better. But this was considered a secondary concern. In the Middle Ages, women were expected to be quiet, obedient, caring, good cooks, seamstresses, life-partners and above all, the property of men.

Due to the general filth of the Middle Ages, combined with a lack of understanding about hygeine, medical science and other factors which we today take for granted, the fear of death was never far away. Few diseases were curable in the Middle Ages and while broken limbs might be treated, if infection set in due to open wounds, there was no way to heal them. Medical aid was usually provided by monks in monastries, by the church, barber-surgeons or wise women: Something like a witch-doctor who knew all kinds of natural, herbal remedies.

Deaths were recorded by Seekers of the Dead, old women or pensioners who viewed corpses to determine cause of death. They would be paid a few pennies to examine the body and arrange for its removal from the household. It would not be until the 1500s, after the Middle Ages, that the Bills of Mortality, which were official records of deaths, were established in London and surrounding villages.

Upon death, the funeral had to be arranged. Often, simple coffins were used and the bodies buried in the local churchyards, marked by simple gravestones, enscribed with the person’s date of birth, death and his name. Some, more expensive gravestones might have had fanciful, death-themed carvings on them. Wealthier families, such as the local landowner, might have a family crypt. In small villages, a death was something that could affect the whole community and often, several people would show up for the funeral. The sandglass, symbolising life, was a common engraving on gravestones. A sandglass with sand drained through meant that life had ended. A sandglass on its side with sand in each of the two bulbs, indicated a life ended before its proper time.

Who was Who?

The Medieval social structure was defined by the Feudal System. The Feudal System was the belief that each person had his own special place in society and that in this place they would (unless something special happened) remain. At the top of the Feudal System was the King. Below him were the noblemen. Barons and Earls and Dukes and so-forth. Below them came the knights. Below knights came the various classes of the peasantry. Although divided into various classes (from freemen to villeins and serfs), there were few differences that actually set them apart, since life was generally a big struggle for all.

The king, as supreme head of his country, granted lands to his noblemen, who, as his representatives, were expected to carry the king’s law and the king’s word to parts of the kingdom where the king himself could not visit regularly. The noblemen swore an oath of alliegence to the king, and knights, further down, swore an oath to their local landlords. The peasantry, however, the lowest and poorest class of people in the Medieval world, were the most numerous in number. They fell under the direct rule of their landlord, who could tax them and use them as he wished. Far from the king’s eyes, some noblemen became greedy, corrupt and lawless, taxing their peasantry to exhaustion. Taxes were given in the form of harvest and grain. Crops such as wheat, rye, barley and whatever else the peasants could grow, were taxed, and a certain percentage of this food had to be delivered to the local lord. Food which the peasants kept for themselves which had to be ground from wheat to flour to make bread, had to be ground up and crushed in the only mill available in the village…the lord’s mill, for which the lord would charge another fee for the peasantry to use.

Medieval Food and Drink

Medieval food was pretty basic for the peasantry. Most of their food came from grains; the most common of which were barley, oats and rye, which they turned into porridge, gruel or bread. They also ate fruit, vegetables and whatever fish they could catch in nearby streams, rivers or lakes. Wealthier people such as noblemen, could afford to feast on game birds such as ducks and pheasants and anything else which the landlord could afford to flush out of the woods around his estate and shoot with a bow and arrow. Hunting on the lord’s estate only permitted at his lordship’s personal invitation, so peasants could not expect to get their hands on such delicacies as fresh meat.

Fresh meat was in fact, very hard to come by, and was eaten mostly by the upper classes, who could afford to eat, not only game birds, but also chicken, pork, bacon, ham and if they were lucky…beef. Due to the high costs of transportation and mediocre food-preservation methods available in the Middle Ages, exotic foods which were not locally available were often so expensive that commoners could not hope to ever eat them.

In the days before refrigeration, however, Medieval people did find ways to preserve food. Foodstuffs such as meat and fish were either dried, salted or smoked. This killed off bacteria, gave the food a nice (if salty) taste and allowed it to keep for longer periods of time. Fruit was either dried, sugared or preserved in honey. Where possible, some foods were kept in cold-houses, where snow or ice was used to lower the room-temperature and ensure that the food remained fresh.

While they were able to preserve food to a certain extent, Medieval people did not possess the technology or understanding to purify water. Drinking water was often dangerous due to the impurities and pollution that was to be found in local streams and rivers (in the days before sewers and toilets, rivers often served as drains!). Because of this, the most commonly consumed beverages were wine, beer and ale. Due to the general absence or lack of water in these beverages, they were considerably safer to drink than plain water. And everyone drank it…even children! In fact, there was even a special children’s ale brewed specifically for younger people to drink!

Ale and beer were often sold in alehouses, inns and public houses (‘pubs’) and a single village could have several of these institutions all over the place! Public houses lasted and continue to last for a long time. Some of the oldest pubs in the United Kingdom have survived from the Middle Ages, including Ye Olde Man & Scythe (est. 1251), Ye Olde Salutation (est. ca. 1240) and finally, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, which claims to have been established in 1189!

Men of Letters

Education was a rare treat for people in the Middle Ages. A very rare treat. Most people could not read or write at all. The most learned places were churches, monastries, castles, palaces, universities, colleges and schools. If this sounds like a whole heap of educational institutions, think again. To be able to attend one of these places, you had to be rich. Really rich. Books and scrolls were worth their weight in gold in Medieval times. Before the days of the printing press in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the main way of copying out texts was to do it by hand with a quill pen and an inkwell of ink. This took weeks, even months of daily writing in a special room known as a scriptorium (latin; a place for writing).


A Medieval monastry’s scriptorium with a scribe at work

Because so few people could do it, writing was considered a real artform in the Middle Ages, and bold, decorative hands were created, characterised by the gothic German ‘Blackletter’ script, of bold vertical lines and thin horizontal lines, which was achieved by writing with a flexible-point quill-pen. Other characteristics of Medieval texts included colourful borders and pictures, illuminated (coloured) letters at the tops of pages and paragraphs which were deliberately larger than other letters, so that people would know where to start reading each text. Scribes, learned persons and men of letters were so rare that only the wealthiest of people could afford to have an education. A king or queen would employ a tutor or a schoolmaster to educate their princes and princesses in reading and writing, skills as rare in the Middle Ages, as finding a competent watchmaker today.


A page of illuminated gothic Blackletter script from a Medieval manuscript

The main writing implements of the Middle Ages was another reason why many people were illiterate. The pen was a goose-feather quill, a tool which took considerable time to clean, dry, temper, slit and cut correctly. Paper, parchment and vellum were expensive, handmade commodities, far out of the reach of the peasantry, who were more interested in staying alive, rather than reading about how to do it!

Another huge barrier to education in the Middle Ages was that, as members of the Church were the only ones who could generally read, most documents were written in the language of the Church, and not the language of the People. The language of the people was…English! (Or German, French, Italian, Polish and so-on). However, the language of the Church was…LATIN! This rather significant language-barrier meant that, even if the peasantry were able to read and write, it would’ve been largely useless, because all the church-documents were written in a totally different language!

For those who could read and write, however, they enjoyed the rare ability of being able to send letters and record thoughts and ideas. In the days before organised postal services, messages were delivered by private messenger. Forget Private Messaging services on internet forums or MSN Live Messenger; this form of messenger-service was a rider on horseback! To protect the contents of their documents and letters, writers often signed and sealed their documents with sealing-wax, marking the hot wax with a sealing stamp or signet-ring, partially to ID them as the sender, and also to act as an anti-tampering device. Traditional sealing-wax dries fast and it dries hard and brittle. If a seal was broken by anyone other than the intended receipient, then it would be immediately obvious that the privacy of the document had been breeched. You can read about the history of seals, sealing-stamps and signet-rings here.


A signet-ring used to seal documents with wax. The coat of arms, monogram or family-name was deliberately engraved into the ring in mirror-fashion so that the imprint would turn out the right way around when the ring was pressed into the hot wax

Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

As Harry Potter learns in one of his History of Magic books, “Muggles were particularly afraid of witchcraft in Medieval times, but not very good in spotting it”.

These days, the idea of actual witches and wizards seems ludicrous: the stuff of fairytales, legends and novels by an acclaimed English childrens’ author. But in Medieval times, there were real and very intense beliefs and fears in witches. And not all witches were women, either!

In Medieval Europe, under the Feudal System, peasants lived and worked on the land owned by their landlord. They were not generally allowed to leave this land without their lord’s permission. Because of this, families grew, died, intermarried, mingled and gave birth to sucessive generations all in the one little village or town year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Small, close-knit communities in hamlets and villages, in a day where few people travelled beyond the village boundaries, were quick to spot any and all persons who were either new to the area, or who acted in a strange manner.

Anyone who did act in a strange manner, or who was new to the district, was always the first suspect in anything that went wrong. Witch-trials were popular and bloody spectacles throughout Europe and punishments for witches varied. In European countries, the common penalty for witchcraft was death by burning, whereupon the ‘witch’ was strapped to a post and had faggots (clear your minds out, perverts…a ‘faggot’ is a bundle of kindling!) tossed at her feet. The faggots were then lit and the victim died from either burns or smoke inhalation and suffocation. In England, however, hanging witches was the more common form of execution.

A lot of our modern stereotypes about witches (that they have black pointed hats, that they have warts, that they have flying broomsticks and black cats and all the rest of it) all have their origins in the Middle Ages. It was believed that witches kept demons (called ‘Familiars’) near them, in the shape of animals. It is from this belief that we get the stereotype of witches always having a black cat with them and where we also get the superstition that it’s bad luck to have a black cat cross your path. The presence of bodily blemishes (such as pimples or warts) was also seen as the mark of a witch. Such an evil person was sure to have marks of evil (characterised by warts!) all over them!

Law and Order

In Medieval times, with knights and crusades and wars and witches and the Black Death and fat, warty toads bouncing around all over the place, it’s probably little wonder that Medieval law and order was especially harsh and barbaric (gotta keep those toads in order, don’t we?).

Medieval laws were set by the King (or queen), or by the king and/or queen’s top subjects: Their noblemen. Laws covered everything from how many loaves of bread a baker needed to bake, what constituted proper ale and even what side of the road you were allowed to drive on. Local city or village laws also related to keeping what was known as the King’s Peace: The peace and tranquility which the monarch promised all his subjects. Keeping the peace was done by instituting such laws as providing each village and town with a ducking-stool (into which, chattery women could be strapped and ducked…dumped…into the nearest pool or pond) and the enforcement of curfews after dark. Noblemen were allowed to pass their own laws on their peasantry as they saw fit…and some noblemen saw fit to tax their peasantry very harshly indeed.

Medieval punishments were even worse than the laws for which the punishments were seen fit. Various medieval punishments included…

– The Rack – Being stretched on the rack until your arms and legs ripped out of their sockets.
– The Gallows – Being hanged by the neck until dead.
– Hanging, drawing and quartering – A particularly gruesome method of execution awarded to persons found guilty of High Treason (crimes against king and country).
– Impalement – Being impaled by a long, blunt wooden pike. A favourite of the Medieval king Vlad Tepeche, Vlad the Impaler.
– Sawing – Being strung upside down on a frame and having your body sawed in half lengthwise, starting between the legs, with a massive saw.
– Breaking on the Wheel – Being strapped to a wagon-wheel and having your limbs smashed and broken by a sledgehammer.
– Being boiled in oil – Another Medieval favourite! King Henry VIII of England (AKA Old Greedy Guts) sentenced a cook to be executed by being boiled alive in a pot of oil, for trying to poison his master’s gruel!

Other, lesser punishments included…

– The Whipping Post – Being strapped or tied to a post and flogged.
– The Stocks or Pillory – Being confined to a set of stocks (head & arms locked in a wooden frame) or pillory (feet, as well) and being left there for a pre-determined period of time. In rare instances, people actually died in the stocks or pillory, from abuse from passers-by.

Of course, if laws existed and punishments existed, someone had to uphold the law and someone had to deal out punishment. Who did what?

The job of upholding the law was given to various persons. Ordinary citizens were expected to keep law and order, of course, but there were persons whose job it was, to specifically keep the peace. Some might have been knights, or they might have been reeves of the shire. The local reeve of the shire, or the Shire Reeve, was the local custodian of the peace. Does the word ‘shire reeve’ sound kind of familiar? It should. The shire reeve still exists today…but probably not in a manner which medieval peasants would recognise. In Modern English, the job-title is spelt…Sheriff.

It was the local lord or if he was available…the king, who was generally in charge of meting out punishment. That was until naughty King John was given a small piece of paper to sign. The title of this piece of paper?

Magna Carta Libertatum.

That’s its name in Latin. Translated to English, it means “The Great Charter of Liberties”.

The Magna Carta, created in 1215AD, was a document that restricted the power of the king and held him legally accountable if he was a naughty little boy…like King John. One of the main rules of the Magna Carta was that it forbade the King from pronouncing judgement on criminals.


A copy of the Magna Carta

Sickenesse and Healthe

Medieval understanding of the human body was rudimentary at the very, very, very best. People did not understand how the body digested food, how it got sick, how it healed itself, how blood circulated, and dozens of other ‘how’s. Without highly scientific TV shows like “House” to teach them, Medieval physicians were often medicating their patients purely through superstition and guesswork.

Medieval medicine was based on the theory of the Four Humours, a very old system of medical belief that dated back to Ancient Greece! Humourism, as it was called, centered on bodily imbalances…but not in the way we might think. To find out more about the history of medicine, read the link above.

Medical practicioners were few and far between in Medieval Europe. Physicians were expensive and generally ineffective. Most people had to rely on the local priest, the local wise woman or the local barber-surgeon, who gets his title because he was just as likely to give you a mullet as he was to slit open your gullet. Medieval medicine was a mixture of practicality, tried-and-tested methods, myth, legend, old wives’ tales, natural remedies and superstition. There are various stories of surgeons and doctors in Medieval times performing truly amazing operations and having their patients survive. Amongst these include removing stones (such as kidney-stones) from the body and removing arrows shot into various places on the body…such as a direct hit to the face!

Of course, the biggest scare to the Medieval world came in the 1340s, with the Black Death (also called the Great Plague, the Plague, the Black Plague, the Bubonic Plague and The Sickenesse). It wiped out literally millions of people through the years of the late 1340s and came back almost every generation since then. There are still instances of the Black Death today, although the number of these instances are greatly reduced from the horrifying figures of the Middle Ages.


Victims of the Black Death

Medieval Jobs and Occupations

There were all kinds of jobs in the Medieval world. Blacksmiths, coiners, sadle-makers, roofers, farmers, goldsmiths and printers. Many English surnames come from the classified employment advertisements of the Middle Ages.

Surnames like…

– Sadler (saddle-maker).
– Sandler (sandle-maker).
– Chandler (…eh…chandler. That is…a candle-maker).
– Fuller (A fuller, someone who removed impurities from cloth).
– Tyler or Tiler (A roof-tiler).
– Slater (someone who provided slate for roofing!).

Many jobs were unskilled, but some occupations required great skill, such as blacksmiths, goldsmiths, jewellers, coiners, printers, watchmakers and swordsmiths and armourers. Persons engaged in such occupations usually formed guilds with other such persons, in order to protect their skill-sets and also to advance the quality of their craft. Guilds were kind of like labour-unions/exclusive clubs where persons of the same craft or occupation could gather and protect their ideas and skills from others. This was usually done in structures called guildhalls (like a clubhouse). Guilds, as formal institutions, however, had to have some sort of legal status. A guild could not be formed without the permission of a person of authority. In England, this authority was usually the reigning monarch who would give various craftsmen the right to form a guild through the issuing of Letters Patent; a legal instrument allowing for the formation of various offices, organisations and institutions.

Other Aspects of Daily Life

What about all the other aspects of daily life, apart from food, reading, writing, laws, order, education (yawn!) and all that rot? What else happened? Didn’t anyone ever have a bath?

Actually, bathing was not that common in the Medieval era. It was not seen as being necessary, it was seen as too much hard work (and after a day ploughing the fields, the last thing you wanted was more work!) and it was seen as pointless, because once you were clean, you would only get dirty again the next day!

But, in the rare instances that people actually bathed in the Medieval world, it was either done in a ready source of water (a stream, lake or river) or it was done in the bathtub. Bathing in a bathtub was such a hassle that most people just didn’t bother! You had to light a fire, boil the water, fill the bathtub, wait for the water to be juuuust right, then you had to strip, get in, scrub, scrub, scrub, get out, dry down, put your clothes back on and then tip out the water.

Oh, but only…and ONLY…after every other person in the household had used that exact same bathwater to have their baths, too! Hot water was too scarce a commodity to waste on just one person!

What about clothes and bedsheets? Weren’t they washed?

Yes. But again, very rarely. It wasn’t generally seen as being necessary, and men and women could wear the same clothes for days or weeks on end before having them changed. In mose cases for the peasantry, they didn’t have very many other clothes to change into, so there was no point in washing them!

Entertainment in the Medieval world came in various forms. Without books to read or xBoxes to play on, movies to see or late night peepshows, entertainment was found in sports such as skittles, darts, bear-baiting, puppet-shows and that favourite of all childrens’ pastimes!…

…fairytales!

Fairytales were born out of the Middle Ages as stories to distract peasants from their miserable lives. Stories like Rapunzel fed the dreams of peasant girls that they would be whisked off by their Prince Charming. Hansel and Gretel probably made little peasant boys forget their own hunger for a while, while also teaching children not to wander from home, lest they find ugly witches with houses made from gingerbread. More stories, such as Cinderella and The Magic Flounder were more famous fairytales, told to children (and probably to adults as well) to entertain them when there was nothing on the local stage to watch.

 
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A Cornerstone of Style: The Three Piece Suit

Reading an article a few days ago about the movement to “stop the sag” and to ask people to haul up their trousers, pants and jeans so that decent people didn’t have to check out the cut of your briefs, boxers, boxer-briefs or the fact that you weren’t wearing any undergarments at all, inspired me to write this article on the cornerstone of men’s clothing: The Suit.

Not too long ago and within living memory, men knew how to dress acceptably. Somewhere along the way, it became commonplace to wear jeans, shorts, logo’d T-shirts and all manner of other, shocking invaders of style which are now considered “normal” clothing. I’ve always been a very old-fashioned, conservative and formal sort of person (there, I said it), and I lament the fact that such fashion-phenomena such as “sagger jeans” have become as acceptable as doing burnouts and doughnuts in the local parking-lot with your father’s BMW. Fortunately, all is not lost, and if those gaudy, glitzy and flamboyant photographs that we see online, from fashion-shows are anything to go by, a more formal and respectable mode of men’s clothing may soon be on the rebound.

It was common, until about the 1960s, for men to wear a suit, be it single-breasted, double-breasted, two or three-piece, tweed, wool or of some other, less-desirable fabric. In the 60s and 70s, with T-shirts, jeans and sneakers marching into stores all over the place, this era of elegance, style and sophistication was swept aside like so many decades of dust. So…the suit. What is it? Why did people wear it? What went with it and how did it all go together?

For the purpose of ease-of-understanding, the ‘suit’ referred to in this article will be the classic, three-piece suit:


A typical three-piece suit, with jacket, waistcoat and trousers

The Suit: A History

The classic man’s suit, as we know it today, was born in the 17th and 18th centuries. For a long time, men wore knee-breeches, stockings, flashy tailcoats and shirts with ruffled collars and cuffs. In the mid 1600s, King Charles II introduced a garment which Samuel Pepys records as being a ‘vest’; a sleeveless garment with pockets and buttons and buttonholes down the front. Although originally called a ‘vest’, it receives its alternate name, the ‘waistcoat’ because this new garment was cut and shaped so that it literally reached to just above the waistline. The first piece of the three-piece suit had been created.

The next things to come along were trousers and the fitted suit-jacket or suit-coat. Previous to the late 1700s, men wore knee-breeches. A rough, 21st-century equivalent might be three-quarter jeans. The legs of the breeches reached to knee-level (hence the name knee-breeches) and the remainder of the leg, from the knee downwards, was covered up by long stockings, which were alternatively either buckled or buttoned to the bottom of the breeches to stop them slipping down.

The suit-jacket was evolved from the long tailcoats that men used to wear. These were usually loose and flappy. But one man started changing this. His name was George Bryan Brummell. He lived from 1778-1840. Does his name sound familiar? It should. Or if it doesn’t…perhaps you recognise his other name…Beau Brummell.


Typical men’s clothing of the 18th century, until Brummell decided that this had to change. Here, you can see the tailcoat, the knee-breeches and the mandatory white stockings and buckled shoes

George ‘Beau’ Brummell was the man who changed mens’ fashion forever. In the late 1700s, he introduced what we would now call the three-piece suit, to society. Brummell’s suit was made up of a matching coat, waistcoat and knee-breeches (later, trousers), made from the same cloth with the same pattern. The clothing was intended to be comfortable, less flamboyant, more conservative and better-fitting. From the late 1700s until the 1950s, the suit retained all these three features: Coat, waistcoat and trousers and it remained the backbone of respectable male attire for over a hundred years.

What’s in a Suit?

The three-piece suit is made up of…three pieces. Duh! But what are they?

Jacket

Suit-jackets have between two-to-four buttons, depending on its size. A good-fitting jacket should have sleeves that come down to the first knuckle of your thumb when your arms are hanging by your sides. The jacket would have between four to five pockets, depending on the design. The breast-pocket of the jacket is used to hold a handkerchief (folded as a pocket-square) or alternatively, a pocket-watch (which would be affixed to the jacket’s lapel buttonhole with a leather fob-strap). The lapel buttonhole usually held a flower or a small, decorative trinket. There was a time when you could buy little tube-like vases which you could slip into your buttonhole. You filled the little receptacle with water so that your flower could survive a bit longer than it would if it was just cut off and stuck in there. The T-bar of a pocket-watch’s leather watch-strap should go through the lapel buttonhole from the front of the jacket, not the back, so that the T-bar itself is neatly hidden from view.

Waistcoat

Waistcoats come in several varieties: Single-breasted, double-breasted, two-pocket, four-pocket, belted, unbelted, silk-backed or plain. They’re like Heinz Ketchup of men’s clothing.


A four-pocket, six-button single-breasted waistcoat. Traditionally, the last button on a waistcoat (with six or more buttons in total), is left undone. This style was supposedly established by Edward VII, who habitually left the last button of his waistcoat undone, either by chance or design. Soon, his subjects started copying him

A good waistcoat was designed to be close-fitting, with the bottoms of the arm-holes going directly under the armpits of the wearer and the bottom hem of the coat reaching around the hip-bones. Waistcoats could be either double or single-breasted. Most people are familiar with the single-breasted variety, though. More expensive waistcoats came with silk backs instead of wool like the rest of the waistcoat would be. Waistcoats with belted backs allowed the back of the garment to be taken in or let out to a certain extent to provide for a better fit. Waistcoats come with either two or four pockets, depending again, on the size and style of the waistcoat.


A grey, two-pocket, six-button double-breasted waistcoat. Double-breasted garments were popular in colder countries because the fold of the cloth prevented wind from entering the coat through the gaps in the buttonholes

“How do you wear a pocket-watch with a waistcoat?”

Before wristwatches came along in the 1910s, every man who wore a watch, wore a pocket watch and chain. How was this attached to the waistcoat? Where’s the elusive ‘watch-pocket’? And how did men get their chains to hang so nicely from their waistcoats?

Firstly, there is no real ‘watch-pocket’ on a waistcoat. The watch-pocket was simply any one of the four (or two) pockets which the pocket-watch was placed in. Attaching the chain to the waistcoat, however, took a bit more skill.

There are two chains which you can wear with a waistcoat: The Albert and the Double Albert. Who’s Albert? Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. He was the man who created the Double Albert chain, which was named after him. By extension, the single T-bar chain was thereafter called the “Albert” or “Single Albert”. But enough about Albert.

To attach a T-bar chain to a waistcoat, you need to fold the T-bar up against the chain so that the chain and T-bar are parallel to each other. Then, you push the T-bar and the chain through your selected buttonhole and then pull back on the chain until the T-bar catches against the buttonhole. The T-bar should be at right-angles to the buttonhole so that it doesn’t come back out. With the T-bar in, you simply push the button through the hole like you always would. The button keeps the T-bar in place and stops it wiggling around. Don’t worry, this won’t hurt the waistcoat in any way.

Selecting the best buttonhole to put the T-bar into is up to personal choice, but generally, the button which is closest to the top of the watch-pocket, or a middle button on the waistcoat, is preferrable, because this gives the chain a nice, balanced look with the top of the watch-pocket. A pocket watch and Albert chain can be worn with either single or double-breasted waistcoats, but Double Albert chains will only work (acceptably) with single-breasted. Wearing a Double-Albert chain with a double-breasted waistcoat will get you arrested by Inspector Jeeves of the Fashion & Style Police Department.

Trousers

Unlike jeans, cargo pants and shorts for which ‘sagging’ has sadly become an accepted manner of wearing garments that cover the legs, trousers that hang halfway off your ass and dangle so low your dingle would flop out if you sneezed, are not acceptable in any way, shape, manner or form in any area of the universe at all. Doing this will also involve Jeeves dragging you off to jail for a crime against acceptable dressing.

Trousers should be comfortably held around the waist by nothing but your own body. Or, if your own body isn’t sufficiently padded to carry out this gravity-defying stunt, then a belt (or more acceptably, braces/suspenders) should be used to keep your trousers at an acceptable and non-arrested-by-the-cops-for-indecent-expsoure level. Traditionally, suspenders were buttoned or clipped onto the waistband of your trousers, and you can still get trousers with suspender-buttons, or you can just sew them on yourself. The bottom hems of your trouser-legs should reach around your ankles.

The Modern History of the Three-Piece Suit

With all that, you have the three elements that make up the classic three-piece suit. From its creation in the late 18th century up until the 1950s, this mode of dressing was almost mandatory amongst men. It was a sort of unwritten code of acceptable dressing. To appear in public without your jacket and waistcoat without an acceptable reason (such as doing dirty work) was pretty much equivalent to streaking butt-naked through church on Sunday. In the colder climates around the world, such as the northern U.S. states, the United Kingdom and Europe, or in the colder, southern countries such as southern Australia and New Zealand, wearing a three-piece suit was not only fashionable and stylish, but also necessary. The suit kept your body warm and the waistcoat provided a very necessary extra level of padding and warmth against freezing winter temperatures.

The downfall of the three-piece suit started, like with so many other nice things from history, with the Second World War.

During WWII, if you’ve read my article on life on the homefront during the War (see the “WWII” area of this blog), you’ll know that cloth (amongst several other things) was heavily rationed, due to the necessity for making uniforms for service-personnel. This drastic rationing of cloth meant that it was impossible for tailors to continue making the three-piece suit. The extra fabric needed to make the waistcoat just couldn’t be found. And it was because of this that the two-piece suit became more fashionable in the postwar years, although it survived (if only just) into the 1970s, when disco-music brought it back into fashion.

Today, the three-piece suit hasn’t exactly returned to mainstream fashion, although there are people who still wear them on a regular basis. The waistcoat, a four-hundred year old article of clothing, has returned to fashion lately, and movies like the recent “Sherlock Holmes” one have encouraged designers to experiement (with questionable results) with traditional male attire. Although considering it was perfect to begin with, one wonders what there is to experiment with. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And a three-piece suit made entirely of denim is unlikely to sell anytime soon.

 
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Cranks, Keys and Carriageways: A Brief History of the Motor-Car

Today, the car, the automobile, the horseless carriage and that stupid rust-bucket that’s parked in your garage right now, is as much a part of life today as is the television, the internet, the iPod, Phone, Pad and (regrettably) rap ‘music’. But spare a thought for the fact that motoring as we know it today is only a little over a hundred years old. It would be fair to say that the average man on the street wouldn’t know a single thing about the history of the very thing he’s driving around at that very moment: The motor-car. This article will be a brief peek into the history of the greatest thing since the steam-engine…

Before the Car

It’s hard to imagine life before the car, isn’t it? A world of steam-trains, ocean-liners and horses and carriages. A world where horsepower was literally horse-powered. If you didn’t own a horse and carriage of some kind, you were stuck with either walking, or taking a train or streetcar somewhere. While self-powered land-vehicles that could move on the road existed in the 19th century, it wouldn’t be until the early 1900s that they would become seriously practical. And it wouldn’t be for a few more years, that your regular Tommy Ryan could afford to buy one of these new horseless-carriage gizmoes out of his own pocket and drive it around town.

The Birth of the Motor Car

This…is genesis:

This here is the Benz Patent Motorwagen and it is quite literally, the first car ever made. It was powered by a two-stroke, one-horsepower engine and it was introduced into the world in 1885. Queen Victoria was still on the throne. Jack the Ripper was still sharpening his butterknife and Sherlock Holmes was still a blob of ink inside an inkwell. But this contraption, born in an age of the horse and buggy, was about to show everyone that personal, motorised transport was possible.

Although the Benz Motorwagen was hardly ideal as a car: It had no safety-features, it had three wheels, it had a tiller steering-handle and a pathetically small fuel-tank, not to mention a hopeless range of operation, Benz was not about to give up. Over the next few years, he refined and modified his machine to such an extent that in August of 1888, what was possibly the world’s first stolen car report was filed at the local police station (okay that’s a joke, it wasn’t, but you’ll soon see why it might’ve been). For on a day in August in ’88, Mrs. Bertha Benz, Karl Benz’s wife, successfully started her husband’s car and, with her two sons along for the ride, drove them off to visit their grandmother, before driving back home three days later. The length of the trip was 120 miles! Mrs. Benz had successfully shown the world that the car could travel long distances!


The Benz Motorwagen No. 3, made in 1888. This was the car which Karl Benz’s wife started up and drove off in, on that August day, over 120 years ago

Over the years, more and more people started experimenting with these newfangled “internal combustion engines”, in attempts to create their own ‘horseless carriages’ as they were still widely called. The British Government didn’t take kindly to scientific and technological advancement in the world of transport, however, because it slapped a FOUR MILE AN HOUR speed-limit on early motor-cars! The first speed-limit ever imposed for self-powered vehicles was 10mph in 1861. In 1865, the Brits made the law even tighter, saying that self-propelled vehicles could travel at the breakneck speed of four miles an hour in the country but only two miles an hour in town! Finally in the 1890s, though, with the arrival of the motor-car, British lawmakers allowed a speed-limit of 14 and later, 20 miles an hour, starting in 1896.

Car companies sprang up almost overnight as the 20th century approached. Some notable early ones included Renault (1899), Ford (1903), Mercedes (1902) and Stanley (also 1902), which was famous for making steam-powered motor-cars. Slowly, the world took to the road.

Starting Something Totally New…

    “…For making the carriage walking at the first speed, take back the drag of the wheel backward crowbar of the right and take completely and progressively back, the crowbar of embriage…”
    – Jeremy Clarkson, “TopGear”.

Okay, I kid, I kid…that’s actually French translated into English. But as you can see, early motor-cars were far from easy to drive. These days, we get in, we insert the key, we turn it, we swear for a couple of minutes and then we get moving. Early cars were nowhere near as easy to operate. To start with (literally), you had to crank these cars to get them going.

Early cars did not have ignition keys, they didn’t have electric starter-buttons, starter-motors or anything like that. To get them going, you had to crank them by hand. And while this looks like a lot of fun, it wasn’t exactly easy. You’ve probably seen vintage cars in movies or cartoons being the subject of slapstick comedy where someone tries (hopelessly) to get a car started by cranking it, only to fail miserably. The truth is that some (but not all) early cars were that hard to start. And not only hard to start, but also dangerous! You needed considerable strength to start a car in the old days, because everything inside the car was mechanical and made of metal. If you didn’t have the muscles to turn the crank-handle (which could be particularly tricky in some cars), then the car never started. Usually, you slid the crank-handle into a hole in the front of the car, which sent the crank through the crankshaft inside the engine. Then, you grabbed the crank and with considerable force, turned it clockwise in an attempt to get the pistons moving to start the engine-cycle.

One of the big risks of crank-starting a car was personal injury. By cranking the starting-handle, you moved the crankshaft inside the motor and this got the pistons inside the engine moving. Once the sparking-plugs ignited the fuel and the engine started working by itself, the car could be driven. But when this happened, one of the biggest risks was of the crank-handle being thrown backwards, against the driver’s hand, by the force of the pistons coming to life. The most common injuries included broken wrists and broken arms. Nasty stuff! Several early motor-car companies tried to introduce braces or catches or modified engines where the starting-handle either jammed or was stopped in some way, if the engine backfired, or else disengaged the starting-handle when the engine caught on, so that it wouldn’t kick back and break the driver’s arm.


A 1909 Model T Ford with prerequisite antique car crank-handle at the front. Apparently this one disproved that a motorist could have his car any colour so long as it was black

Early motorists were instructed to grasp the crank-handle in a certain way, with all fingers on ONE side of the crank, instead of four fingers on one side, and the thumb on the other (as you might do with other crank-handled appliances). The reason for this, was so that if the engine kicked back, the handle would swing away from your hand and nothing went wrong. Grasping the handle the traditional way meant that at the very least, you suffered a broken thumb when the engine came to life. The increasing power and size of car-engines as the 1900s progressed, meant that it began to take more and more strength to crank start a car and eventually, electric starter-motors were introduced.

Of course, not everything was this easy. Headlamps on the earliest cars were gas-powered. These had to be lit either manually, or with pilot-lights or sparkers. And starting a steam-powered car, such as those manufactured by the Stanley company up until 1925, was almost like trying to get a steam locomotive going from a cold start. First you had to fill up the boiler with water, and then you had to make sure that there was enough kerosene in the tank, you had make sure that the pilot-light was on and that the water was being boiled sufficiently. With the water boiled, you had to wait for the steam-pressure to build up before you could actually drive the car away. Considering how tricky it was to get a steam car started, it’s rather surprising how long they survived. The reasons for building steam cars, however, was rather obvious when you consider that the steam-engine had been around for about a hundred years longer, starting in 1900, than the internal-combustion engine, the bit of machinery that drives almost every car in existence today.

Driving Along in my Automobile

Early motoring was a thrill. It really was. These days, we use a car for everything. Going to school, going to work, going to the shops, going to visit friends and family…but things were very different a hundred years ago when you were probably the only person on the block who owned his own motor-car! Having got the car started, you didn’t want to just waste all that petrol and water and oil driving somewhere for a PURPOSE, did you?

No! Once you got that thing going, you wanted to muck around with it, yeah? Which is exactly what many people did. Having a family car in the 1900s or the 1910s was considered a real luxury, and many of the times that the car drove off down the road would have been with the entire family onboard for a roadtrip or an excursion. Barrelling along at twenty or thirty miles an hour was a thrilling experience when you consider that the other way to move around was by horse and cart.

However, taking the family out for a spin in your new automobile wasn’t always safe. Most early roads were almost lethal to drive on. They were mostly dirt roads or cobblestone or flagstone roads, which gave no joys to the passengers in your shiny new ride when suspension hadn’t really been thought of yet. And even if you found a nice road to drive on, when you parked your car, you had to make sure that nobody tried to pinch it! Henry Ford used to have to chain his car to a lamppost everytime he parked it and secure it there with a padlock, otherwise, the moment he stepped away, some inquisitive bystander would try and crank up his new toy and drive off with it!

However, getting to treat the family to a ride in the automobile was something that was nothing but a dream, and for many men, remained a dream until 1908.

Model T Fords and Mass-Production

One of the biggest problems of early motor-cars was the fact that they were dizzyingly expensive. A car in the 1900s could cost upwards of $1,000. While this doesn’t sound too bad today, remember that in 1900, a good pocket watch cost $50, a fountain pen cost $2, a film-ticket was five cents and it was cheaper to send a telegram than to use the telephone! Groceries for a family of four for a week could be bought for less than $20!

Because of the dazzling cars and the equally dazzling price-tags, it’s not surprising that for many people, motor-cars were something to be seen driving by, but never to be seen driving in. Cars were handmade with expensive coachworks which were made up of leather and brass and chrome and other fancy-schmancy things that cost a fortune. Only the richest of the rich could afford cars. Millionaires, businessmen, royalty, heads of state and so-on. For everyone else, the only rubber that was going to hit the road for them was the soles of their shoes.

That was until Henry Ford put two and two together and made Ford. Or the Ford Model T, to be precise.

Henry Ford didn’t invent the car. He didn’t even invent mass-production. But what he did invent was a way to put the two things together. By working on a moving production-line, Ford realised that, with work coming to his men, instead of his men going to their work, a lot of time could be saved in manufacturing a car. One reason why cars were so damned expensive was because they took literally days, weeks, in some cases, even MONTHS to make. Not just a line of cars, I mean literally ONE car. If Henry Ford could cut down how long it took to make cars, then he could make more cars in a shorter amount of time. More cars meant that the prices went down and if the prices went down, then ordinary people could buy them.

The Model T was introduced in 1908, when Ford started mass-producing cars. The chassis, the wheels, the seats, the engine and everything else was built at one part of the factory and progressively joined together. At the end of the line, the body of the car was dumped on top. The final touches were added, the car was gassed up, cranked up and then driven off into the world. It was amazingly simple.

One reason that Ford managed to make his car plants so efficient was that he kept breaking down jobs. If making an entire door was too hard for one workman to do by himself, then Ford broke the door down into component parts. One man made the hinges, one man painted the panels, one man screwed on the doorhandles and one man put in the window. It meant that the Ford car plants had to employ hundreds, thousands of people, but it also meant that they could work for longer hours. Ford workers worked eight-hour shifts and earnt $5 a day. $5 a day when Cocoa Cola cost 5c, was a lot of money. And by having eight-hour shifts, the factories could operate literally around the clock.


This Ford Model T four-door tourer was typical of the millions of Model Ts produced by Ford: Simple, tough, reliable and understated

When Ford Model Ts were being sold, they originally started out at $850-950 (in 1908 dollars). If this sounds steep, then you can try and find something else for $900. Not easy when the next least expensive car skyrocketed upwards to $3,000!! As Fords continued to be made, however, the price did (thankfully) drop, to about $280 in the 1920s, which which time literally half the cars in the world were Model T Fords.

The Model T wasn’t a great car. It wasn’t fast (45mph top speed), it wasn’t classy (“a customer can have a car painted any color he wants, as long as it’s black”, Henry Ford), it wasn’t easy to operate (“…it’s more complicated than doing eye-surgery!…”, thank you Jeremy Clarkson) and it certainly wasn’t big (one of its nicknames was the ‘Tin Lizzie’! and you can be sure that doesn’t sound very chunky!), but what it was, was a car that allowed everyone from Dr. Jones right down to Mr. Bentley at the corner shop, to drive around town.

Changing the World, One Car at a Time

Everyone generally assumes that a car built before a certain time is either “classic”, “vintage”, “veteran”, “crap” or some other delightful categorical name. But what is what?

“Veteran” cars signify any cars made between the 1880s up to 1919. These include the very first cars ever made by most companies, and the earliest Model T Fords.

“Brass-Era” cars are cars manufactured in the period between Veteran and Vintage, generally accepted as been between 1905-1914/15. So named because of the heavy use of brass on these cars (headlamps, grilles, dashboards, side-mirrors, etc).

“Vintage” cars were cars manufactured from after the end of WWI to the Wall Street Crash, so, from 1919-1929. It was during this period that cars stopped looking like ghost-carriages without horses at the front, and started representing what we would sort of recognise as a car today, with a passenger area, the engine out the front with a bonnet or hood, four wheels and a roof and windows! It was during this time that cars also started being widely manufactured with self-starters; everything from electric starter-buttons to…*gasp*…car-keys!! Yes! No more broken wrists!


A 1929 Model A Ford, a typical vintage car of the 1920s and 30s, with curved mudguards and a less angular body, but boxy in appearance nonetheless


1916 Cadillac Type 53. Yes, that’s James May and Jeremy Clarkson from TopGear in the front, with Clarkson at the wheel. I think I’ll walk

According to the automotive TV show “TopGear”, it was the Cadillac Type 53 that gave us one of the greatest pieces of metal in the world. The car-key! With that, cars became safer, easier to start and more fun to drive. This template for the modern car was introduced to the rest of the world thanks to Herbert Austin, founder of the Austin Motor Company. The first car other than the Caddy Type 53 to have car-keys and all the gears and pedals in the configuration that we know today was the famous and miniscule Austin 7…


1922 Austin 7 “Chummy” Tourer

As you can see, the Austin 7, while ‘modern’ in the sense that it had all the controls in the right order, was hardly luxurious or any of that rot. It was basically an updated, more modern and British version of the Model T Ford. In fact the Austin 7 was so incredibly small, it was popularly nicknamed the “Baby Austin”. If you think you recognise the Austin 7 ‘Chummy’ Tourer, it’s because a 1/2-scale fully-functional model of the car (in bright yellow!) is used in the popular British TV series “Brum”.

Last but not least, we have “Classic” cars. For a car to be a ‘Classic’ car, it has to have been built between 1930-1960. Such ‘Classics’ might have included several cars manufactured by the famous “Deusenberg” company, the Chevrolet Bel Air, the Auburn Boattail Speedster and countless other wonderful machines.

As cars became more and more popular and companies started producing luxury as well as cheap models, the car began to take over the world, but the world wasn’t quite ready for it. Many roads were still unpaved and hideously dangerous to drive on. Ironically, when we think of early motor-cars, we think of them as delicate little sardine cans held together with chicken-wire which fell apart if you farted too loud, but actually, some of them were rather tough. The Model T Ford was able to start in almost any weather, it could drive through water, through snow, through mud, through dirt roads, up and down hills, it could literally drive off-road without breaking down and it did all this with a top speed of just forty five miles an hour and wooden-spoked wheels! It might’ve looked flimsy, but on the other hand, it might also have given the Jeep a run for its money.

And yet, the horse and cart still hung around. The last horse-drawn taxi-license was issued in London in the late 1920s. Police-forces did not start using regular patrol-cars until the 1920s and in some places, horse-drawn tram-services continued well into the 30s and 40s (although in all fairness, horse-tram services returned to some countries in the 40s because they needed the petrol to fight the Axis. You can’t use horse-poop for anything in warfare).

By the 1920s and 30s, the era of motoring had really taken off. The road-trip became a popular kind of holiday as families and their friends packed up their Packards, Studebakers, Austins, Fords and Maxwells (Hello, Jack Benny!) and took to the road. Petrol-stations, diners, roadside inns and caravans popped up almost overnight as cars started driving around the world. Cars gradually became safer as shatterproof glass began to replace the brittle glass that was previously used in windscreens and windows. In 1903, French chemist Edouard Benedictus dropped a glass flask which had the leftovers of cellulous nitrate plastic inside it. His happy accident led to his development of what we now know today as laminated or shatterproof glass. Not originally used in motor-cars, it would be another thirty years before this newer, stronger, safer type of glass replaced the dangerous and brittle glass then used in car-manufacturing.

The birth and development of the car was going along nicely until a small hiccup called the Second World War came along in 1939. Because of the strain of total war, car-production ceased the world-over, starting in 1940 in the UK and in 1942 in the USA, with no new cars being produced by either of those two countries (or indeed, several other countries) until 1945 at the very earliest.

Postwar cars were just as fascinating as their prewar parents and the boom years of the 1950s saw larger, chunkier cars being produced, such as one of the most iconic cars of the 1950s, the Chevrolet Bel Air:

The Chevy Bel Air symbolised cars of the 50s: Large, bold, excessive bodywork with more fins than a seafood restaurant and so much chrome that the car was basically a massive mirror on wheels. To its credit, though, the chrome-plating did have a practical use: It prevented the car from rusting from exposure to moisture.

From its humble beginnings as the crazy invention of a German engineering and metalworks student to one of the most important modes of transport in the modern world, the car changed everything around it, everyone in it, and everything that it drove past, forever.

 
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Time in Motion: The Story of the Sea-Clock, or Harrison’s Chronometers.

Special Note: This article will concentrate on the life work of Mr. John Harrison, an 18th century clockmaker who, through literally decades of work, changed maritime navigation forever. It is not meant to be an in-depth look at the history of finding longitude, which is something that would take up the space of several articles!

A Problem at Sea

These days, navigation at sea is pretty easy. You have GPS, you have radio, you have compasses, clocks, maps and a million other navigational aids to get your ship from A to B nice and safe…dependent, of course, on the weather. But that’s now in the 21st Century. Three hundred years ago, maritime navigation was nowhere near as easy. Mariners were in constant danger of getting lost at sea due to not knowing where they were, how far they had travelled and how far they still had to go. On a ship at sea with limited supplies and limited time to find safe harbour, not knowing your position was a serious safety-hazard.

As everyone who’s passed highschool geography ought to know, the world is divided up in a grid by lines of latitude (horizontal lines that wrap around the earth and which stack up on each other), and lines of longitude, which go around the earth from east to west, meeting at the North and South Poles at the top and bottom of the globe. Back in the early 1700s and even before this, taking one’s ship out to sea was a dangerous endeavour. Once beyond the sight of land, it was very difficult to fix one’s position, and therefore know how far your ship had travelled.

The position of the sun changes at noon, due to the curvature of the earth; this is why at extreme points on the earth, such as near the poles, you might have full sun at midnight and nothing at all at midday. Sailors were able to determine their north-south latitude position by measuring the angle of the sun at noon against the horizon. This measurement obtained, they were able to mark on a chart, how far north or south they were of the midpoint of latitudes, the Equator. However, finding out how far east or west you were of a given position was considered impossible, because this required knowing very accurately, what the time was.

“Okay so you need to know what the time is to find your spot on the earth. Get a clock or a watch, dunk it on the ship and let’s go!” you probably say.

It isn’t that easy.

Clocks in the 17th and 18th centuries were large pendulum clocks (also called ‘grandfather’ clocks). Although a pendulum clock could keep almost perfect time on land, its ability to keep accurate time at sea was greatly diminished due to the fact that sailing ships rock, pitch, roll and sway on the ocean waves. Such aggressive movements threw the pendulum’s swing (and thus, the clock’s timekeeping abilities) off-beat, rendering the clock useless. The only watches available were old-fashioned pocket-watches, which, although they required no stable surface to keep time, unlike the pendulum clock, they were often not manufactured to such a level of quality as to keep time accurately at sea. Pocket-watches often varied several minutes a day. While to us a minute of difference either way doesn’t sound serious, a minute lost or gained at sea meant being off your position by as much as four degrees. If again, this doesn’t sound serious, it actually meant the possibility of being off your course and position by a matter of several miles.

Telling Time at Sea

While there were several proposals put forward on how to accurately determine a ship’s longitude, the one which most people are familiar with today, is the one involving time. The earth revolves at a constant rate. A full 360 degrees in twenty-four hours, or fifteen degrees each hour. By knowing the time at two places at once, a navigator could calculate fairly easily, his ship’s position of longitude.

If a ship left England at noon and sailed for America, it would be able to determine its position by checking the time on its sea-clock or marine chronometer, as is the correct term. When the chronometer showed it was noon in England, the navigator had to wait until it was noon onboard his ship and record the time-difference. A difference of two hours meant the ship had travelled thirty degrees (since the earth turns 15 degrees each hour). In theory, this was simple, but as I mentioned, the clocks available in the 1700s meant that keeping accurate time at sea was all but impossible.

John Harrison

After a series of catastrophic shipwrecks in the early 1700s, it was decided that the British Government had to put some serious thought into the safety of British sailors. In 1714, the year that King George I came to the throne and heralded the start of the Georgian Era, a board was set up, called the Board of Longitude. Its purpose was to judge and examine any and all schemes for successfully determining a ship’s position of longitude at sea. A prize of twenty thousand pounds sterling, was offered to any person or group of persons who successfully produced a device or a method by which longitude could be accurately determined at sea.

Enter John Harrison.

You couldn’t possibly find a more unlikely person to be the man who would change history so momentously, and who tackled the biggest technological problem of his generation. John Harrison was born in 1693. In 1714, he was a mere twenty-one years of age. John was born in the village of Foulby in West Yorkshire, the first of five children. His father made a modest living as a carpenter.

In 1700, the Harrison family moved to the village of Barrow-Upon-Humber in North Lincolnshire, the village where Harrison would spend almost the rest of his life.

In the 18th century it was common for children to follow their parents into their chosen professions. Watchmakers gave birth to watchmakers, lawyers to lawyers and carpenters to carpenters. With his father’s occupation as a carpenter, it was inevitable that John Harrison would follow his father into the woodworking trade. Only, instead of working on furniture, young John concentrated on something else. Clocks. He spent countless hours examining, disassembling and reassembling clocks and watches, until he knew them as well as he knew himself. One legend goes that when he was sick with smallpox in 1699, he was given a pocket watch to play with while in bed. He spent hours winding up the watch, holding it in his hands, looking at it, listening to it and opening it up to look at all the fiddly little moving parts inside it. By his early twenties, Harrison, who had previously been a bellringer at the local church as well as an apprentice carpenter to his father, officially decided that he would become a clockmaker. He completed his first, fully-functional clock in 1713 at the age of twenty.

Harrison was very good at what he did. A perfectionist with perhaps a slight twinge of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Harrison went over his pendulum clocks over and over and over again, checking and re-checking everything to make his machines more accurate. Considering that Harrison never had any formal education, never went to school and never went to university, he was doing very well in understanding such complex machines as mechanical clocks. Harrison had quite a reputation for his clocks. In an era where a good clocks kept time to a few minutes a week, Harrison’s clocks boasted accuracy to a few SECONDS a MONTH.


This clock, manufactured almost entirely of wood, was completed by John Harrison in 1717, at the age of 24!

The Longitude Prize

Sooner or later, Harrison was bound to find out about the longitude prize. With his background in clockmaking, Harrison was quick to grasp the fact that knowing one’s position at sea was best determined by knowing accurately, the time in two places at once: Onboard ship and at a home port. Unfortunately, as he also realised, such clocks as those which existed in the 1700s, were woefully inaccurate for the task which they would have to perform. Harrison, like so many others before him, recognised these problems with a clock keeping time at sea.

1. Temperature. Mechanical timepieces keep different times in different temperatures. Hot temperatures cause them to slow down, cold temperatures cause them to speed up. This is due to the wood or the metal inside the timepiece reacting to the temperature around it.

2. Humidity. Moisture affects how smoothly a clock runs. Condensation brought about by rapid temperature-changes could cause a clock to rust or collect water, which would slow it down.

3. Motion. The rocking, rolling, plunging and heaving of early sailing-ships meant that the clock or watch would be subjected to massive amounts of sudden and violent movement. A significant enough jolt, such as that produced by a ship sliding down the trough between two waves to impact against the next wave coming foward, would be enough to throw a clock off its accuracy, rendering it useless. And even without the storms, a swaying, rocking ship would not allow a clock’s pendulum to swing back and forth reliably enough to keep time.

To solve all these problems, Harrison knew he had to do some very careful thinking. By the 1720s, Harrison’s experience in clockmaking and timekeeping was significant. His fanaticisim with accuracy meant that he tested his clocks to make sure that they kept perfect time under every single variation he could think of. He solved the problem of clocks keeping time through temperature-differences by placing two clocks in two rooms in his house during a frigid day in winter. He built a great fire in the fireplace of one room and kept the other room freezing cold. He synchronised both clocks and then kept a check on how fast or slow each of the clocks were and adjusting their pendulums correctly.

Despite never having gone to school, despite never being taught how to read and write except through his own determination, Harrison wrote reams and reams of paper, covering his research into the affects of temperature, lubrication and the use of various metals had on his clocks. After years of research and experimentation, Harrison was ready to have a shot at the Longitude Prize.

There was just one problem.

Due to the great inaccuracy of clocks at the time, no scientist, naval or government official believed that any clock could be produced that would ever keep time at sea. This prejudice against clocks was widespread and it even included one of the most famous scientists of the day: Sir Isaac Newton. Harrison knew that he would have to be incredibly good with his work if he ever had a chance of claiming his twenty-thousand pound prize.

Time and Patience

Harrison made a total of five marine chronometers in his life, three clocks and two pocket-watches. His first clock, “H1”, was presented for trials in 1736. Harrison was forty-three years old.


A model of H1. The two counterweights at the top of the clock (linked by the metal coil in the middle) were designed to swing back and forth, to act as shock-absorbers against the rock and roll of the ship

H1 was taken for trials and Harrison accompanied his creation on his first and only trip to sea. His ship, the HMS Centurion, travelled from England to Portugal, docking in Lisbon. From there, Harrison caught the HMS Orford back to England. The crew of the Orford were much impressed by Harrison’s newfangled invention and praised him for his efforts. The Board of Longitude was also sufficiently impressed to pay him two hundred pounds sterling towards the development of another clock.

Harrison’s next clock, H2 was completed a few years later. Harrison knew that his clock had to be stronger and tougher. It was a machine, not a showpiece. This clock was more boxy and compact than H1, but it kept time just as well.


An old photograph of H2

The War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748) meant that Harrison wasn’t allowed to take his newest sea-clock on a trial voyage. Military officials were worried that the clock might fall into enemy hands. Instead, the Board of Longitude gave Harrison another five hundred pounds towards further development of his machines. The result was H3.


John Harrison’s marine chronometer officially called “H3”

While Harrison was happy with H3, he soon decided that he’d been wasting his life all these decades. While Harrison’s clocks all kept wonderful time and while they could be used at sea successfully, Harrison just wasn’t convinced that this was the right way to go. Clocks were bulky, expensive, delicate machines that took up space on a ship which had very little space to give. Frustrated, Harrison gave up on trying to make marine clocks and instead did a complete, 180-degree turn and considered manufacturing a marine watch instead.

The watch in the 18th century was the pocket-watch. A large, round, bulky thing, but small for the period. Most watches were expensive, but kept only mediocre time. Harrison was sure that he could improve on then-current designs, and come up with a masterpiece.

To help him in this endeavour, Harrison consulted a man named John Jeffreys, a professional watchmaker. Jeffreys agreed to manufacture a pocket watch for Harrison. But there was one catch. It was to Harrison’s own personal design. Jeffreys accepted the challenge and set to work.

When the watch, now known as “H4”, was completed, it was so incredibly accurate that Harrison was probably slamming his head against the wall at his own stupidity for wasting his life fiddling around with clocks instead of pocket-watches! H4 took six years to complete and was finally ready for testing in 1761, by which stage Harrison was nearly seventy years old!

Far too old to go to sea again, Harrison’s son, Joseph, agreed to test his father’s watch. Joseph boarded a ship, the HMS Deptford and set sail for Jamaica. After weeks at sea, Joseph Harrison determined that his father’s watch was off by a mere…five seconds.


Harrison’s masterpiece: H4

The Board of Longitude were not pleased. And neither would you be, if everything you said was wrong was suddenly proven right, and a watch or a clock could keep accurate time at sea! The father-son team of John and Joseph Harrison awaited their prize-money of twenty thousand pounds.

Which never came.

The Board of Longitude demanded another test. The outraged Harrisons had no choice but to oblige them, if only to prove them wrong, and Joseph Harrison packed his bags for another voyage, this time to Barbados. The watch didn’t fare quite so well this time, with Joseph making the inaccuracy to be thirty-nine seconds out. But things were made even worse by the appearance of a man named Nevil Maskelyne.

Maskelyne was easily Harrison’s arch-rival in the race for the Longitude Prize. Maskelyne was a proponent of the ‘Lunar Distance’ method of determining longitude at sea.
The moon moves at a constant rate around the earth; twelve degrees a day. By measuring the angles between the moon and sun before one left England and measuring these angles later when the moon was over the horizon, one could determine how far one had travelled.

There was one big problem with Maskelyne’s lunar-distance method. It was highly complicated; and most seamen were not mathematics whizzes who specialised in geometry. While Maskelyne’s method did work, Harrison believed it wholly impractical at sea due to how long it would take to calculate distance.

Claiming the Prize

Upon Joseph’s return to England, the Harrisons once again presented their results to the Board of Longitude. This time, the Board could not ignore the papers in front of them. Once is beginner’s luck. But…twice?

The Harrisons demanded their prize and were eventually offered ten thousand pounds sterling, if they agreed to turn over H4 for duplication by other watchmakers. The Harrisons did so, but the money was not forthcoming. In a twist of fate that must’ve made John Harrison rip his hair off his head, his rival, Maskelyne, was made Astronomer Royal, and thus, a member of the Board of Longitude, who could therefore influence the Board’s decisions. Maskelyne managed to find a loophole in the criteria for claiming the prize-money and effectively told the Harrisons to get lost and that they weren’t allowed the twenty thousand pounds.

Infuriated, Joseph Harrison took a pen and a piece of paper and in a very bold move, wrote directly to the one man he was sure could help him and his father claim the money which they knew was theirs.

While Joseph worked on his letters, John went back to watchmaking. In the 1760s and 70s, he created his fifth and final marine chronometer, H5. In 1772, Joseph finally had success.

The two Harrisons had managed to obtain a private audience with the King of England.

King George III listened patiently while the father and son team beat out their case in front of him. His Majesty was moved by their plight and was obviously not pleased at what was happening. He whispered to an aide that the two men had been “cruelly wronged”. After much consideration, George III took Harrison’s latest creation, H5, and performed accuracy tests on it himself, checking its timekeeping day in and day out for ten weeks, from May to July in 1772. George III, though famous for going positively looney, deaf and blind towards the last years of his life, was, amongst other things, an avid lover of science and technology. His observations told him that H5 kept time to 1/3 of a second a day! A phenomenal feat of accuracy in a day and age when a regular pocket-watch kept time to a minute a day! Eventually, the king called the Harrisons before him and advised them on a course of action. He suggested that the two Harrisons petition Parliament into giving them the twenty thousand pounds of prize-money and told them that if Parliament refused, to further add that the king himself would enter the chamber and give the entire house a good talking-to.

Well…no politician wants to be told off in public by his king.

Finally, in 1773, John Harrison got…well…some money. Eight-thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds sterling, from Parliament, for his efforts.

If we add up all of the money that Harrison recieved for his work, we’ll find that it totals a whopping twenty-three thousand and sixty-five pounds! However, the official Longitude Prize of twenty-thousand pounds was never awarded to anyone, even though it should rightly have gone to John and Joseph Harrison.

Even when Harrison realised how much money he was making, he still wasn’t happy. He’d never recieved the public recognition of his achievements that he’d hoped for. It was as if the people in charge turned red-faced with embarrassment, shoved over a pouch of gold and then slammed the door in his face. By now, Harrison was eighty years old. Harrison had spent almost literally, his whole life trying to solve the biggest technological problem of his age, and he was never even thanked properly.

In the end, Harrison died at the age of eighty-three, barely able to live in retirement for a decent length of time to enjoy his riches. He passed away, aged 83, on the 24th of March, 1776. Ironically…the date of his death, was also the date of his birth, exactly 83 years before in 1693. He was buried in the churchyard of St. John’s Church, in Hampstead, London, alongside his second wife, Elizabeth, and their son William.

Harrison’s Legacy

Some people say that an artist’s work is never truly appreciated until they’re dead. In Harrison’s case, this was almost certainly it. Although he never recieved the fame, fortune and acclaim that he had hoped for in his own lifetime, Harrison’s lifetime of work saw the expansion of the British Empire by making sea-travel much, much safer.

And yet…despite all his efforts, marine chronometers were not widely used, initially. Their high manufacturing cost meant that these amazing machines were out of the reach of all but the wealthiest of seamen; those who had made lots of money as merchant captains or officers in the Navy, who could afford to purchase an expensive and accurate sea-clock for their ships. But as years went by, the use of marine chronometers eventually increased, until they were declared obsolete in the late 20th century, by the coming of GPS.


A marine chronometer clock, of the kind that was common from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries. The clock is housed in a special wooden case and is mounted on a gimbal so that it swivels and pivots. This way, the clock always lies flat, even if the ship is rolling and heaving at sea

Harrison’s clocks and watches were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Rupert Thomas Gould, a Royal Navy officer. He is credited with documenting, examining, restoring and preserving Harrison’s clocks and saving them from total destruction. It is thanks to his research and restoration-skills that H1, H2, H3, H4 and H5 are still around today. H1-3 have been reassembled and restored to operational condition. They may be seen at the National Maritime Museum at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, England. H4 is also restored, but H5 still requires restoration. Only H1, 2 and 3 are in operation, however, since H4 and H5 require significant lubrication to operate successfully, whereas H1, 2 and 3 do not.


H5 (currently unrestored); the last marine chronometer that Harrison made, and the very one which was tested by King George III himself

 
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The Graceful Swan: Restoring an Antique ED Fountain Pen

The Subject of Operation

There are all kinds of companies which used to make all kinds of interesting things, but which have since been lost to history. Like Burma-Shave, Rexall, Carter’s (That’s CARTER’S, not Cartier’s!) and Waltham. Add to this list one of the most famous pen-manufacturers in the world: Mabie Todd & Co.

Mabie Todd & Company was founded in New York City in 1860 as a manufactuary of writing supplies, gradually moving into the writing instruments market by making dip pens and pencils. In the 1880s and 90s, with the start of the fountain pen industry, led by giants such as Waterman and Parker, Mabie Todd & Co started making these newfangled ‘fountain pens’ as well, something that continued for several years right into the 1940s and 50s.

This last week, I was very fortunate to purchase an early Mabie Todd & Co fountain pen, a first generation “Swan” model. The Swan pen was made starting in the 1890s and it represented the best quality pens that the company made. Below “Swan” were the “Blackbird” and “Swallow” model pens.

My pen is an early 1900s Mabie Todd & Co “Swan”, made ca. 1908. It’s made of BCHR and it’s an ED pen with a threaded section and barrel and a slip-on cap and you’re going waaaait a minute what the hell are all these acronyms for?

“BCHR” stands for “Black Chased Hard Rubber”, hard rubber being the stuff that all early fountain pens were made of, black being the colour, and chasing being the heat-imprinted patterns that were rolled onto the pen-barrels when they were made. “ED” stands for “eyedropper”. These early fountain pens, such as the one which is the subject of this article, did not come with their own, inbuilt filling-systems like later pens. To fill them up, you had to unscrew them, fill up an eyedropper with ink, and then drip the ink into the pen-barrel before screwing the section and nib-assembly back onto the pen to write with it.

The pen was in surprisingly good condition for something that was over one hundred years old. BCHR is very prone to “oliving” (turning brown and green) if it’s left out in the sunlight. The sunlight leeches the black out of the rubber which was introduced into it when the rubber was being vulcanised for penmaking. This pen had very little noticable oliving, mostly around the cap, but thankfully, that was all.

Structurally, the pen was perfect. No cracks, chips, dings, scratches, gouges…even the smooth panel on the barrel reserved for engraving was perfect, unblemished and smooth. The cap, of the slip-on variety (pens this old did not have screw-on caps) was of smooth black hard rubber with a gold cap-jewel, a gold cap-band and a very large gold pocket-clip. The cap-band has the letters “A.E.E.” engraved handsomely on it. Here is the cap:

The nib of this pen featured a very unique “over-under” or “double” feed. The O/U feed was a common design-feature on very early fountain pens; feeds were not yet advanced enough to deliver enough ink to the nib, so early fountain pens had double feeds to compensate for a lack of inkflow. If ink refused to go along one feed, then it would flow along the other feed, instead.

This is the pen with the cap off and posted on the back of the barrel, which is specially shaped to take the cap:

You might be able to just see the over-under feed on the nib, on the left side of the photograph.

Restoring the Pen

Enough about the aesthetics and the mechanics. What about the restoration!?

Okay maybe “restoration” isn’t the right word. Think of it more as “repair”. I didn’t really restore anything: The cap is still olived and the nib is still a bit grimy…but I did manage to return this beauty to its original working condition. Huzzah!!

Unfortunately, doing this was far from easy. Whoever last owned this pen filled it up with blue ink, put it away in a drawer and then promptly died, or forgot about the pen entirely. The result was that the ink dried inside the pen. Now you hear a lot of people say: “If you don’t use the ink in your pens for a long time, empty the pen and wash it”.

Why?

This is exactly why. When the ink dries…it turns to CEMENT. This pen was jammed shut so tightly, you couldn’t break into it with C4 explosives! The ink had gotten into all the seams and threads inside the pen-barrel and it had dried and glued the whole thing shut. You could look like a pro wrestler and you still wouldn’t have been able to get that pen open to refill it, without cracking it in half like a pretzel first. Regrettably, hard rubber can be very brittle. Hours of twisting and wiggling on my part yielded nothing in terms of the pen opening up. It soon became painfully clear that the way to get into this pen was not through muscles and force, but with patience.

Old eyedropper pens work in the following manner: You unscrew the section and nib-assembly from the barrel. You fill the barrel with ink using an eyedropper (hence the name), then, you screw the section and nib-assembly back onto the pen and write. In this instance, the section, thanks to the blue glue cement inside, was completely unmovable. No amount of squeezing and twisting would get it to budge. To remedy this, I filled a shot-glass with water and a bit of soap and dunked the pen into it, from the nib right up to the top of the section. I removed it every hour or so, to tap it and shake it to get some of the ink out…and boy was there ever a lot of it! Bright royal blue ink! And it kept coming and coming and coming for the next twelve hours! Whoever used this pen before me really loved him some blue ink!

Finally fed up, I changed the water, added some fresh liquid detergent, dunked in the pen and left it overnight. This was necessary, partially because my wrists and arms were so tired from trying to shake and twist open the pen, and partially because the soap and water needs time to seep into the pen and loosen up any leftover ink.

The next morning…today, rather…I removed the pen from the water and wiped it down. Very carefully, I unscrewed the section. Gently, at first. Then, I felt it move. I had to be very very careful opening this pen: there is a very thin line with hard rubber, between sufficient force and accidently crushing the pen, shattering it, snapping it in half and having a pile of antique crap in your hands. I kept unscrewing and unscrewing. I had to turn several times to get the section off the barrel, because by design, eyedropper pens have very long threads (they have to, to prevent leaking). With the pen disassembled, I filled it up with water to flush it out one last time, and then filled it with ink, using an eyedropper that I bought specially for this historic occasion.


The disassembled Swan eyedropper fountain pen. The slip-on cap is on the left, the barrel is on the right. In the middle is the successfully-removed section & nib-assembly. That really long thin black thing you see sticking out the back of the nib is the feed

The pen worked absolutely flawlessly. No dripping, no skipping, no scratchiness, no fading or anything. Perfect inkflow. Not bad for a 102 year old fountain pen, eh? It now has pride of place in my collection.

Special Note:

Pen repairers, collectors and users are divided over the method of soaking a BHR pen in water. Some feel that this is dangerous and that it could damage the colour of the pen, while others actively encourage the use of water to clear out a pen. I’ve used the water-soaking method before without any ill effects and I’m of the opinion that this method is safe to use with antique hard rubber fountain pens, provided that the water isn’t too hot.