21/06/2012 by scheong

Still More Origins of Common English Phrases

And welcome to another installment of the origins of common English phrases. In this posting, we have…

Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls off a Brass Monkey

Meaning: REALLY REALLY REALLY COLD!!

Before you start, this has nothing to do with primate testicles.

A ‘brass monkey’ was the nickname given to the rack or stand which held cannonballs on old wooden battleships. Brass was chosen because it doesn’t rust in the salty air of the ocean. But in cold weather, the brass would freeze and shrink at a faster rate than the iron cannonballs. This meant that the cannonballs would become unstable in cold weather and roll off the rapidly shrinking ‘monkey’, scattering and rolling all over the deck. As this would only happen in extremely cold temperatures, when it was ‘cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey’, it had to be exceptionally nippy outside.

Sleep Tight!

Meaning: Sleep Comfortably.

We’ve all had our parents say this to us at least once, right?

“Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed-bugs bite!”

Thanks to the news-stories being flashed across our television screens in this increasingly health-conscious world that we inhabit, we’re all rather aware of what bed-bugs are. Little blood-sucking bastards which crawl around in dirty linen.

But what exactly is the ‘sleep tight’ thing?

“Sleep Tight” refers to the earliest forms of beds.

Back when going to bed literally meant having to make your own bed, ‘sleeping tight’ meant just that. Sleeping nice and tight, a necessity, any chiropractor will tell you, for keeping perfect spinal alignment.

On early beds, the wooden frame had holes drilled into it. Through these holes, ropes were weaved back and forth lengthwise and widthwise across the empty middle of the bedframe. Such weaving was usually done by a man called a webber or a webster. If your name’s ‘Webber’ or ‘Webster’ and you ever wondered where it came from, it’s from this type of weaving, or ‘webbing’, which was strung across bedframes.

To prevent the mattress falling through the rope webbing, or netting strung out between the bedframe, it was necessary, every now and then, to pull in the slack of the ropes so that the mattress wouldn’t sag down during the night. Thus, you were quite literally “sleeping tight”, with firm, tightly-stretched webbing for a better night’s sleep.

Good night!

“In the Limelight”

Meaning: To be the center of attention.

Some people love being in the limelight. Others hate it. But what does light have to do with citrus fruits?

…nothing at all.

The ‘lime’ mentioned in ‘limelight’ comes from a compound called calcium oxide, more commonly known as ‘quicklime’, a sort of chalky, white substance.

In the Regency period, major public buildings such as theaters could be effectively lit at night for the first time. The laying of the first gas-mains, with gas-jets and nozzles allowed large public institutions to be lit brightly at night for the first time in history. No longer did people have to rely on candles and oil-lamps to light the way. While gaslight was a vast improvement over candlelight (especially once they’d worked out the kinks), there was still one big issue…Gaslight is stationary.

You have a wall-bracket, or a chandelier of gas-jets, which you would light and then cover with a glass shield. And…that was it. It was bright, but it wasn’t that bright, and it couldn’t be moved around like an oil-lamp or candles. Theaters with performances taking place at night were lit by footlights on the stage (gas or oil-fired) and by gas or oil-lamps hanging from the ceiling. But the light was not nearly powerful enough to make it effective.

Enter…Limelight!

It was discovered in the 1820s that you could light oxygen and hydrogen and create a powerful flame.

…Yeah.

But people already knew about gases and stuff like that. So what’s the big deal?

Nothing. But then they realised that this very powerful flame, if played over a lump of quicklime, suddenly became blindingly bright. It was discovered that by shifting the position of the flame, or by adjusting it’s size via the amounts of oxygen or hydrogen that were fed to it, the light produced from the flame burning up the quicklime could be vastly intensified or reduced. For the brightest possible light, the hottest part of the flame had to be concentrated on the lump of quicklime.

Realising the potential uses for this, theaters were quick to jump at the chance to use this new type of lighting. Using mirrors and lenses to focus and direct the beam, for the first time in history it was possible for theaters to have powerful and directional lights. Limelights were the grandparents of the huge spotlights that we’re familiar with today. The first theater limelights were fired up in 1837. Their use continued for decades, before finally losing ground to the much more powerful electric lights that were becoming cheaper and more plentiful by the 1880s and 1890s.

For all its power and brightness and fantastic illumination, limelighting was not without its dangers. It wasn’t uncommon for the balloons of oxygen or (especially) hydrogen to be punctured and leak or explode. In especially bad accidents, the entire theater could burn down!

Although we now use electric spotlamps, the old phrase of being “in the limelight” still exists today.

“Wet Blanket”

Meaning: To be a downer. A pessimist. A killjoy.

The term ‘wet blanket’ came around in the 1800s. Like “limelight”, it too was taken from the world of the theater. As early theaters were lit by gas, candles, oil or limelight, the risk of fire was constant. All it took was one careless person, one tipped lamp, or one misadjustment of the limelighter’s gas-levers to cause an explosion or fire in the middle of the performance. To minimise the risk of fire, literal wet blankets were kept in buckets of water on the stage. This way, if the heat from the oil or gas-fired footlights, common to many theaters of the time, did start a fire, a cheap and effective fire-extinguisher was near at hand to prevent a complete disaster. In time, the act of throwing a wet blanket on a fire to put it out became synonymous with someone ‘putting out’ the fun a situation and becoming a buzz-kill.

03/06/2012 by scheong

Singer Attachment No. 160990 – Automatic Zigzagger

I never thought I’d get my hands on one of these, but wonders never cease. This is a Singer Automatic Zigzagger which I purchased today:

As sewing-machine technology improved significantly in the postwar years of the mid-1950s, with the the end of rationing (which in the United Kingdom, lasted twice as long as the war itself!), countries like America and the United Kingdom could start producing better and more advanced consumer-goods than ever. One of the new improvements was sewing-machines that could produce decorative zig-zag, slanting stitches, something unheard of before the war, with all prewar machines being ‘straight-stitchers’, performing a standard, straight lockstitch.

These newer, postwar machines worked by having the needlebar jerk back and forth, from left to right as the machine stitched from front to back. The side-to-side motion of the needle and the front-to-back motion of the machine allowed various types of decorative zigzag-stitches to be created. The machines were popular, but still very expensive. And Singer still had thousands of old-fashioned straight-stitch machines leftover from before the War. How to sell these older, increasingly out-of-date but still reliable machines to a public hungry for the newest postwar technology, not some dated, 1920s piece of junk?

Enter the automatic zigzagger.

A wide variety of zigzaggers, just like a wide variety of buttonholers, were produced by Singer, to be sold all over the world. This particular model, the 160990 (which also came in a 160991 variation), was manufactured for the European and British market (and by extension, the British Commonwealth) in Switzerland. It’s fitting that a country long-famed for its expertise in chocolates and watches, should manufacture an attachment of this quality. It’s exposed, it’s bare, it’s naked, it looks half-complete and you’re probably wondering where the rest of it is…but it is all there.

The beauty of this is that it’s very simple. The parts move freely and smoothly and won’t jam or seize up when the machine is in operation. It has a loose-ish feel to it, but that’s important when anything tighter would cause operational problems.

This zigzagger comes with its original cream box:

And it’s original manual:

It also comes with a dog-plate and all the necessary bits and pieces that go along with it. But most importantly, it comes with these:

These steel discs, roughly the size of a penny, are the cams that you insert into the zigzagger before commencing stitching. The cam you insert will determine the type of stitching that the zigzagger will produce. As the zigzagger operates, its arm will move over the ridges on the cams. The length and depth of each ridge determines the length and size of the stitch, and therefore, the pattern left behind by the zigzagger as it moves across the cloth.

They came in sets of five and ten cams (there’s eight there, so this would be a ten-cam set. Two of them are missing) as well as the zigzagger itself having a default cam set into it to produce a standard back-and-forth zigzag stitch.

Zigzaggers like these, with their cams, were simply fastened onto the machine via the presser-foot bar, in-place of the standard presser-foot. The arm or fork on the right of the zigzagger (in the photo above) went over and under the needle-clamp, moving up and down with the needle as the machine operated. These worked with all old-fashioned Singer straight-stitch machines and were very popular. For a couple of dollars more, you’d purchased a hardware upgrade to your machine and it could now compete with those newfangled “slantomatic” Singers that were just coming off the production-line.

24/05/2012 by scheong

Grandmother’s Dressmaking Shears!

Why Granny! What big knives you have…

Wonders never cease.

I believed that these had been lost when my grandmother moved to the nursing-home. But I found them under a whole pile of junk in a drawer at home. Right at the back. Probably why I never found them before, on previous sweeps around the house.

This fearsome-looking digit detachment-device…also known as HUGE GODDAMN SCISSORS!…is my grandmother’s original pair of dressmaker’s shears!

I remember these from when I was a little boy, and when gran used to scold me for snapping them around with innocent childish glee.

These cold steel hedge-trimmers were what my grandmother used to cut the cloth from which she used to make clothing back in the 50s. They’re professional dressmaking shears, not scissors…shears. And now they’re all mine, with which to flirt with the possibility of horrendous injury on a daily basis!

The shears, as far as I can tell, are about 60 years old. They’re made by the J. Wiss & Sons company of Newark, New Jersey, U.S.A., a respected German-American toolmaking firm of over 100-years experience and manufacture of bladed instruments. They’re the No. 28 bent-handle shears, meaning that they’re dressmaking shears, with an 8-1/8th inch overall length, and with a cutting-length of 3-7/8th inches. The bent handles at the end (which are deliberately bent upwards) are so that you can cut fabric while it’s lying on the table, without the bottom handle getting in the way.

Near as I can figure, these shears date to ca. 1950. I have found variations of the No. 28 shears in Wiss catalogues dating as far back as 1915, and as recent as right now, on a website selling J. Wiss products, but only the shears from the 1950s exactly match the ones I have on my desk right now. They’re stamped with the words:

“STEEL FORGED”
NO. 28″

inside an anvil-shape, on one side of the pivot, and…

WISS
Newark, N.J.
U.S.A.

…on the other, and WISS – INLAID, on the same side, along the blade.

They come with nice, black, Japanned handles, and the entire thing is made of steel. The shears are made of two parts (handle and blade – left, handle and blade – right), plus a screw and rivet at the pivot-point. There’s no plastic anywhere. That means that there’s nothing here which can snap off or warp or bend or crack and break. Solid, dependable and sharp.

These are not the biggest dressmaker’s shears you can buy, and nor are they the smallest. Wiss & Sons sell shears in sizes anywhere from 6.5 inches, all the way up to monsters which are a foot long! These are kind of like middle-of-the-road shears.

I had them professionally sharpened, and now, they’re back to being functional shears once more. Originally, the pivot was very stiff and squeaky. I tried to remedy this with oil, but it didn’t do anything to help the situation. In the end, I found that the best solution was to soak the scissors in an ultrasonic bath full of hot water. The heat and the sonic vibrations loosened up all the rust and gunk and dust and oil inside the pivot-point, and now the shears swing and slice cleanly, smoothly, sharply and most importantly, silently…apart from a quality-reassuring ‘schink!’ with each closure of the blades…

I cleaned the shears and have since added them to my growing pile of stuff that I need to restore my grandmother’s 1950 Singer 99k. Here’s a photo I took showing (most) of the stuff I gathered so far:

Looking for a pair of top-quality dressmaking shears like granny’s? Here’s a website with information on the company which made the ones I have: Joseph Wiss & Sons website.

J. Wiss & Sons officially lasted from 1848-1976. But the J. Wiss & Sons. brand is still used today, and you can still buy their marvellous, gigantic, all-steel dressmaker’s and tailor’s shears today.

20/05/2012 by scheong

How to Service your Vintage Sewing Machine

Since posting my first sewing-machine piece here on my blog, I’ve received a comment asking for tips and tricks on how to service, clean and oil these machines. I figured I’d write up a posting here, to answer that question in greater detail.

Disclaimer etc: I am not a qualified, certified, expert, professional, master machine-repairman by any stretch of fact, fiction or the most rabid and erratic of imaginations. This is merely a small side-hobby of mine; but everything written hereafter, has been done so with the backing of research and experience gained from practice. I have serviced vintage and antique sewing-machines as a hobby, and have restored some for friends and family.

The information pertaining to sewing-machines as mentioned in this posting is strictly for older machines which are mechanically driven, and not those which are generally, post-1960s, which tend to be operated more via electronics and computerised systems instead of cranks, levers, cams and pistons.

How Does a Sewing Machine Work?

I figured I’d do a bit about this first, since it might bear importance later on.

Be they 100 years old, 150 years old, 50 years old, or brand new, all sewing-machines operate in the same basic manner.

Having prepared the machine for sewing, the following actions occur:

1. The needle descends and pierces the fabric. It retracts. As the needle rises up, it leaves a small loop of thread on the underside of the fabric.

2. The transverse shuttle/vibrating shuttle/rotating hook/oscilating hook (dependent on machine’s age and design) swings around. The nose of the shuttle or the swinging hook, catches the loop of thread left by the upper needle.

3. The loop of thread passes over and around the shuttle or the hook, which pulls the bottom thread through the loop as it goes along.

4. At the top of the machine, the thread take-up lever jerks upwards. This pulls the stitch tight and closes the loop.

5. The feed-dogs perform a four-motion movement. Up, back, down, forwards. This pushes the fabric up against the presser-foot, and shoves it back, out of the machine.

After those five steps, the whole process repeats again. Sometimes as slow as hand-sewing, or, as fast as you can run the machine.

Alright…let’s get to what you’ll need to do.

*SPECIAL NOTE: The instructions in this posting are on how to clean, oil and operate your machine. NOT on how to repair them or fix broken parts. By following the instructions in this tutorial, you understand that your machine is in WORKING ORDER, but requires cleaning and general maintenance*

Tools and Equipment

This pertains specifically to old Singer sewing machines, but most of these things you can use to service any antique or vintage sewing-machine.

You will need…

Needle-nosed Tweezers

I cannot stress this enough. If you don’t have a pair of these…forget it.

You must have a pair. There is absolutely NO other way to get into the TINY little recesses of the machine to dig out the dust, lint, fluff, dead insects, broken needle-tips and other crap that builds up in a sewing-machine over the course of decades.

Forget about the Dyson or the Hoover or the Miele. They can suck like a tornado, they will not remove the bits of grime that are glued and stuck onto the machine, or which are hiding in tiny, inaccessible places. Without needle-nosed pliers, it’s almost pointless to start.

Tissues or Bog-Roll

Tissues or toilet paper to clean, wipe, polish, stop oil from dripping, etc. Don’t just take one or two sheets. Keep a box of the things next to you while you do this.

Cotton Buds

I think the Yanks call these things ‘Q-tips’. Everywhere else in the world, they’re called cotton-buds. Those little plastic shafts with fluffy cotton balls on the end, about two inches long.

You need these to clean, wipe or polish areas of the machine which a tissue or other polishing-cloth won’t reach.

A Powerful Torch

Personally, my eyesight is not good. But this would apply to anyone. You need a bright, powerful (preferably small) torch (‘flashlight’ to the Yanks) while you work. This is so that you can shine extra light into the really dark, tiny, tucked-away places of the machine where conventional lights won’t be able to reach.

A Miniature Screwdriver

Cute little thing, isn’t it? This little Singer screwdriver (or one like it) would’ve come with most vintage Singers when they left the factory, or your local shop. This is my screwdriver

Some sewing-machines come with these little wotsits already supplied. Very handy. I know for a fact that Singer machines were sold with their own personal screwdrivers. If you have one, good. If you don’t, toddle off to find the very smallest screwdriver you can find. A flat-head screwdriver, by the way. Ideally, the size should be 3mm wide.

*SPECIAL NOTE: For owners of Singer sewing machines with bentwood cases. If you don’t have the key for your case and the machine is locked inside, you can use a 3mm flat-head screwdriver as a makeshift key. It does not damage the lock and will serve the purpose admirably*

The screwdriver will be essential for…well…undoing screws and removing plates.

General-Purpose Oil

Get yourself a can of general lubricating oil. Something that’s used on things like hinges and suchlike.

THIS IS NOT TO BE USED TO LUBRICATE THE MACHINE.

The purpose of this oil is to lubricate the case-lock which holds the machine-case onto the machine-base. And this is just about the only thing that it should be used for.

Sewing Machine Oil

You will also need a bottle or can of sewing-machine oil. Ideally, you want sewing-machine SPECIFIC oil. But if you can’t, a high-grade, thin, runny machine-oil, suitable for sewing-machines, will suffice. Just don’t use 3-in-1 oil. It may say that it’s for sewing-machines, but I have it on good authority that this stuff is not the best thing to use. Personally, I use SuperLube machine-oil, which was the one recommended to me by my local repairman. You can buy this oil from your local hardware shop or your local sewing-shop in little 125ml bottles.

Eyedropper or Syringe

This is to distribute the oil around the machine. If you have a spray-can of machine-oil, of the type described above, then you can use the little plastic tube that comes with the can instead, but if the oil comes in a little glass or plastic bottle, then you’ll want something like an eyedropper or a syringe.

Some of the places that you need to apply oil to in a sewing-machine are quite inaccessible to a big, bulky bottle. This is where a local-application tube, or an eyedropper can come in handy.

A Bowl or Plate

Something that you don’t use anymore. This is to house any screws, nuts, feet, plates etc, that you remove from the machine during the course of your restoration. These things are TINY and they will roll away from you, given the chance. And if your machine is 50, 70, 90, 120 years old, chances are, if you lose a particular piece, you won’t be able to just go out and buy a new one.

Metal-Polishing Paste

You’ll also want a tube of metal-polishing paste. You can get this stuff from hardware stores and car-maintenance shops and suchlike. Personally, I use a German-made product called Simichrome, it does the job on most metals with ease (except brass, I think), and the results will look stunning.

Machine-Manual

If possible, you should get a hold of your sewing-machine’s manual. Now I realise that if you’re reading this, your machine is probably one that you picked up at an antiques shop, a flea-market, or which you inherited from granny (that’s how I got mine!) and that half the crap that should have come with it, is missing (just like with me!).

Don’t worry. You can buy (or sometimes if you search really hard, download for free) facsimiles of original sewing-machine manuals.

Having the manual is a big help for obvious reasons. It shows you how the machine goes together, how to oil it, what all the parts are, and most importantly, how to use it!

Right…Got all those things? Let’s get started.

Cleaning the Machine

I’m going to assume that the machine you have is a really old one. By that, I mean at least 60 years old. No later than about 1955-1960 (after that, the technology kinda changes a fair bit and this sort of information isn’t as pertinent to more modern machines). Most likely, it looks something like this:

My Singer 128 Vibrating Shuttle machine

This little sweetheart is a Singer 128 model, and is representative of the kinds of machines seen around the turn of the last century. For those not very good with dates, that’s ca. 1890-1910. Possibly, you might have a slightly later model, such as a Singer 99-series model, from ca. 1920-1960. They look like this:

My grandmother’s Singer 99k

Or perhaps you’ve got one of those big, old foot-driven treadle-machines, which look like this?

Singer 66 treadle machine that I snapped at an antiques shop

Regardless of what machine you have, if it looks like those (or is very similar to those) and is of advanced age, this tutorial should cover all the necessary directions for getting it running again.

The first process of cleaning is de-linting or de-fluffing the machine.

These old machines have a LOT of places where dust, broken needles, fluff, lint, loose thread, bread-crumbs, loose diamonds and other bits and pieces can fall in and hibernate. They jam up the machine and make it difficult to run (or make it run not at all!). It is essential to remove as much of this stuff as possible before moving onto the next step.

When cleaning the machine, you want to start with ONE area at a time. Broadly speaking, a sewing-machine is divided into four basic areas:

1. Needlebar Assembly

The needle-bar is the area of the machine at the head of the arm (the bit that you pass the fabric under). This is comprised of the…

– Faceplate.
– Needle-bar.
– Presser-foot bar.
– Foot-lever.
– Takeup-lever.

2. Bobbin Area

The bobbin area is directly beneath the needle-bar and presser-foot. It is comprised of the…

– Bobbin
– Bobbin-case
– Oscilating hook/rotating hook/shuttle.
– Feed-dogs.
– Slide-plate/s.
– Needle-plate.

3. The Undercarriage

The underside of the machine is where all the secondary cranks and pistons hide out. This is accessed by unscrewing any securing-bolts or nuts, and lifting the whole machine UP and BACK on a pair of hinges. This is where you would traditionally store things like spare needles, manuals, bobbins, scissors, etc. Small fiddly things that you might need. You need to clean in here to ensure that the bobbin-case and the oscilating hook (or other stitch-making apparatus) works properly.

4. Handwheel Assembly

The handwheel assembly and clutch-wheel is the part of the machine right at the back, on your right. This is comprised of…

– The handwheel (big wheel).
– the clutch-wheel (small wheel inside the big wheel. Also called a stop-motion wheel).
– Bobbin-winder
– Drive-belt (if your machine is electrically powered, or a mechanical treadle-machine).
– Hand-crank (if your machine is manually-powered).

Now that I’ve labelled those areas, pick one, and start the de-linting or de-fluffing process. This involves disassembling the area to as far a level as you’re comfortable with/capable of, and poking around with your tweezers (the all-important needle-nosed tweezers I mentioned earlier!) to remove any and all fluff, dust, hair, lint and thread that you might find.

Take your time with this. These old machines gather dust and crud like the Amish gather weaving-looms.

Work through each part of the machine, area by area, systematically. After delinting/defluffing, you want to take your tissues and wipe the area as clean as you can. You might also like to squirt a TEENSY bit of polishing-paste to clean a particular area and give it more of a sparkle. This does a lot more than make it look nice – it helps the machine to run better.

A Word of Caution

In old Singer sewing-machines (and, I believe, in other makes and models), there is often a piece of RED FELT hiding inside the bobbin-well. LEAVE IT ALONE!!!

It is NOT lint. It is NOT junk. It is part of the machine’s design. Do NOT remove it. It is important. Exactly why it is important, I will explain later.

This is the red felt. I’ve included these photographs at the request of a reader, who wanted to see its exact placement within the machine:

If the machine looks a bit weird, its because I unscrewed and removed the needle-plate underneath the presser-foot to take these photographs.

In these photos, you can also see the bobbin (round spool), bobbin-case (thing that the round spool is housed in), bobbin-release button (round button with crosshatching on top) and the feed-dogs (the raised bits with little corrugations on top).

After thoroughly de-linting and wiping down every part of the machine where lint is want to hide (take your time with this, trust me, there’s a LOT of places!), then you move onto the fun part.

Oiling your Machine

Right. You’ve pulled the whole thing apart. You’ve de-linted the machine, you’ve wiped it down, you’ve polished it nice and clean. Now you need to oil it.

Do NOT skimp on this step. Trust me, it’s important. Don’t ever worry about putting in too much oil. Better that the machine should drown in happiness, rather than break it’s back from overwork.

Now that you have thoroughly cleaned the ENTIRE machine, you need to oil it.

Take out your bottle of high-grade machine-oil, made for, or suitable for use in sewing-machines.

If you have a can of the stuff with a local-application tube, even better. If not, then also take out of its place of secretion, your eyedropper or syringe.

What you want to do now is to oil your machine. This is not hard to do. And to be honest, it’s kinda fun. It may take a while, but don’t give up hope. Just keep squirting and testing, squirting and testing.

Oiling a sewing machine is easy. Just follow the golden rule: Oil anything that moves. And oil it more than less.

Now, your machine might run jerkily and stiffly, or, as was in my case, it literally would NOT run AT ALL, and that’s with considerable effort put into trying to rotate the handwheel.

In either case, the procedure is the same.

Take your oil and drip it into, and onto any place in the machine where something moves, or something rubs up against something else. The key spots to oil are the key spots where I mentioned earlier, you need to clean. The four main parts of the machine. The needle-bar area, the bobbin-area, the handwheel-area and the underside.

How long does all this take? I can’t tell you. It’s dependent on the machine. With my first machine, which didn’t move at all before it was oiled, it took nearly an hour (about 45-50 minutes). Yours might take longer, or shorter than that.

Don’t worry about getting oil all over the place. These machines are designed to put up with that. More oil is better than not enough. So squirt or drip it all over the machine in places where it needs to go.

Your machine may have a series of holes all over it. Such as along the top of the arm, around the handwheel-area, at the top of the needle-bar area, and so-forth. These are OILING HOLES. Yay! You can pour as much oil down there as you can fit. The oil will seep into places such as pistons, rods, shafts and cams, and get them to wake up and start moving.

A word, though. Be sure that you clean these holes BEFORE you pour oil down them. You don’t want a dead blowfly inside your machine-head oiling hole to be sucked down into the guts of your great-grandmother’s Singer, to be mashed up into bug-goo.

While you oil the machine, periodically operate it. Pump the treadle, press the foot-pedal, push the knee-lever or turn the crank-handle. This will encourage the machine to move, and this, in turn, will spread the oil further around the machine. Keep oiling, pausing, operating, oiling, pausing, operating, over and over and over.

Oh, and remember that red felt I mentioned earlier? The stuff that hides in the bobbin-area?

Drench it in oil.

It’s there to act as a sponge. Squirt a whole eyedropper of oil onto it. This will keep it moist and happy, and will stop the shuttle or the oscilating/rotating hook from scratching against the metal near the felt, and prevent wear, tear and possible damage.

When have you put on enough oil?

You’ll have put on enough oil when the machine runs freely. You should be able to put your foot down, you should be able to press the knee-bar, you should be able to treadle like an Olympic cyclist, you should be able to crank at the fastest possible speed, and the machine offers no resistance at all.

At the same time, the machine should be a lot quieter. It won’t rattle, squeak, jerk, groan or shake the entire table when it runs. If it does, then it needs more oil.

“I’m done…Now what?”

Okay. You’ve finished the entire project! Now wasn’t that fun?

Once the machine is running and you’re hankering to become the next Savile Row master-tailor, you need to keep your machine in good condition.

Basically, this means keeping the dust off it, changing any broken needles, finding accessories, spare parts and other doodads for it, and keeping it oiled.

These old machines drink oil. And it’s important to keep them hydrated. After any significant project (say you just finished making a whole new set of slip-covers for the pillows and cushions of that big, three-seater couch and two armchairs in the living-room), you should oil the machine all over again. Not much, maybe 2-3 drops in each place. When you’ve done that, run the machine at-speed for about 2-3 minutes, to work the oil in, and then put it away.

Given regular maintenance, a vintage or antique sewing-machine will run for another 100 years. These machines were incredibly tough and they were designed to sew together anything short of sheet-metal. They will EASILY chomp through canvas, leather, denim, or even multiple layers of paper (my record is 56 pages, or 28 sheets of paper…I used the machine to sew together it’s own instruction manual!). Being made of steel and wood, there’s almost nothing on these machines that will ever wear out, apart from tires, protective rubber feet, belts and needles. These can generally be easily replaced, either with reproduction parts, original parts, or from materials jerry-rigged for the purpose (I have seen people who re-belted their old treadle or electromechanical machines using nylon rope, to great effect, I might add).

Dos and Don’ts with Old Machines

DO – Take your time with cleaning and oiling it. Nothing was ever gained by trying to rush something, when restoring a vintage or antique *anything*

DO – Use the proper equipment, materials and tools. You won’t get anywhere if you don’t have the right stuff to do it with.

DO – make sure that you cover EVERY part of the machine when you service it.

DO – check for things such as broken and/or bent needles (if such, then remove them), worn belts or tires, missing plates, bobbins etc. Finding reproduction or original parts for your machine will depend on make, model and of course, age. Singer being the most popular brand, it will be easier to find parts for a Singer machine than almost any other).

DO NOT – run the machine with the presser-foot down, and no fabric between the foot and the teeth of the feed-dogs. This will cause the teeth to scrape against the bottom of the presser-foot, and cause unnecessary wear and damage.

DO NOT – force the machine to operate when it won’t do so. Just keep oiling it.

DO NOT – operate an electrically-powered machine UNLESS you are either damn sure that the electrics are intact, or unless you’ve just had the electrics checked by a certified sewing-machine repairman, or qualified electrician. Don’t forget, these machines are about 75% metal. You don’t want to zap yourself making a quilt.

To the person who inspired this posting (I’m going to assume you know who you are), I hope this answers everything you needed to know about restoring your Singer sewing-machine. If it doesn’t, you’re welcome to post a comment or a question and I’ll do my level best to answer it.

07/05/2012 by scheong

Drifting over the Deep: The Mystery of the Mary Celeste

The Mary Celeste is one of the most famous ships in all history. It’s up there with the Titanic, the Lusitania, the Normandie and the Andrea Doria. It’s claim to fame was the disappearance of all its passengers and crew during a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1872.

How, and why the crew and passengers deserted the ship, never to be seen again, has been a mystery for over a century, and to this date, nobody knows the real reason, although there have been several theories, some more plausible than others. But what really happened onboard the ship?

The story of the Mary Celeste is so famous that there are dozens of conflicting accounts about what is real, and what isn’t. So…what is real, and what isn’t?

What Was the Mary Celeste?

The Mary Celeste was a sailing ship. To be precise, she was a square-rigged brigantine, a medium-sized ocean-going ship with two masts. She plied the oceans of the world as a cargo-vessel, transporting goods across the Atlantic Ocean.

She was built in the early 1860s before and during the American Civil War, and was originally a Canadian ship named the Amazon. She ran aground in 1867, off the coast of Nova Scotia. She was floated, repaired, and then sold to the United States. The ship was restored, rebuilt and modified, and in 1872, it became a merchant-ship transporting cargo across the Atlantic…the Mary Celeste.

The Last Voyage

On the 3rd of November, 1872, the Mary Celeste’s new captain, Benjamin Spooner Briggs, wrote a letter which he addressed to his mother. In it, he wrote, in part:

“My Dear Mother:

It’s been a long time since I have written you a letter and I should like to give you a real interesting one but I hardly know what to say except that I am well and the rest of us ditto, It is such a long time since I composed other than business epistles.

It seems to me to have been a great while since I left home, but it is only over two weeks but in that time my mind has been filled with business cares and I am again launched away into the busy whirl of business life from which I have so long been laid aside. For a few days it was tedious, perplexing, and very tiresome but now I have got fairly settled down to it and it sets lightly and seems to run more smoothly and my appetite keeps good and I hope I shan’t lose any flesh. It seems real homelike since Sarah and Sophia got here, and we enjoy our little quarters…”

“Sarah” and “Sophia” are Sarah and Sophia Briggs, the captain’s wife, and two-year-old daughter, who accompanied him on the voyage.

“…We seem to have a very good mate and steward and I hope I shall have a pleasant voyage. We both have missed Arthur and I believe we should have sent for him if I could have thought of a good place to stow him away. Sophia calls for him occasionally and wants to see him in the Album which by the way is a favorite book of hers.

She knows your picture in both albums and points and says Gamma Bis, She seems real smart, has gotten over her bad cold she had when she came and has a first rate appetite for hash and bread and butter. I think the voyage will do her lots of good. We enjoy our melodeon and have some good sings. I was in hopes that Oli might get in before I left but I’m afraid not now.

We finished loading last night and shall leave on Tuesday morning if we don’t get off tomorrow night, the Lord willing. Our vessel is in beautiful trim and I hope we shal have a fine passage but I have never been in her before and cant say how she’ll sail. Shall want to write us in about 20 days to Genoa, care of Am. Consul and about 20 days after to Messina care of Am. Consul who will forward it to us if we don’t go there…

…Hoping to be with you in the spring with much love

I am Yours affectionately
Benj”

“Arthur” is Arthur Briggs, the captain’s other child, his seven-year-old son (who at the time, was living with his grandmother, the captain’s mother, the ‘Gamma Bis’ mentioned in the letter).

At this time, the ship was docked in New York Harbor.

On the evening of the 4th of November, 1872, Captain Briggs and his wife, Sarah, have dinner with Captain David Reed Morehouse, and Mrs. Morehouse. The two captains have been friends for years, and coincidentally, are both sailing across the Atlantic to Europe, but on different ships, a few days apart.

It is the 5th of November, 1872. The Mary Celeste takes on its cargo for the voyage: 1,704 barrels of highly flammable industrial-grade alcohol. It is to be transported to Italy where it will be used in the manufacture of wine. It also finishes its provisioning for the crossing. It carries enough food for ten people for six months at sea. The ship is seaworthy and ready to go.

On the 5th of November, 1872, the Mary Celeste says farewell to civilisation. It weighs anchor, sets its sails and leaves Staten Island, New York, for the Atlantic Ocean.

On board are six sailors, all of them experienced. All of them level-headed, reasonable men, English-speaking and religious. Providing their meals is the ship’s cook. Their commanding officer is the captain, Benjamin Briggs, who has had several years experience at sea. Joining him on his voyage across the sea to Italy is his wife, Sarah Briggs. With her, she brings their two-year-old daughter, Sophia. Sarah is not afraid, and is not worried about the safety of her daughter. She is an experienced sailor, and is confident that this will just be another of several voyages that she has made with her husband’s company. She’s already been on at least four voyages with her husband before, and is a hardy woman, used to life at sea. Her husband has been a maritime captain for the past ten years. What could possibly go wrong?

The Mary Celeste leaves the safety of the New England shore and sets out into the Atlantic. It charts a course East-by-South, which would take it into the mid-Atlantic, and then straight across, past the Rock of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean Sea.

For three weeks, the voyage is uneventful. The weather was unremarkable and there were no storms or especially strong winds. Onboard the Mary Celeste, everything is calm and normal. The crew man the ship, and Mrs. Briggs tends to her husband and daughter. On the 25th of November, Captain Briggs notes in his logbook that they have sighted the island of Santa Maria (“Saint Mary”), part of the collection of islands known as the Azores…and then…

Nothing.

As far as the world is concerned, the crew and passengers of the Mary Celeste abandoned their ship on, or shortly after that date, for reasons unknown. For the next nine days, the ship wandered the ocean, in a vaguely eastern course. With no-one at the helm to guide the ship, it started a northward tack that it never pulled away from, and just kept sailing…

Onboard the ship, in detail, were…

The Captain. Benjamin Briggs. An experienced sailor of several years experience. He is 37 years old.

Sarah Elizabeth Briggs. The captain’s wife. She is 31 years old. They have been happily married for ten years and have two children. A boy, Arthur, aged seven (then living with his grandmother, the captain’s mother back in Massachusetts, U.S.A.), and a girl…

Sophia Matilda Briggs. The captain’s youngest child, and daughter. She is two years old. She is being brought with her mother on this voyage across the Atlantic.

Albert Richardson. First Mate. Twenty-eight years of age, and a capable and trustworthy seaman.

Andrew Gilling. Second Mate. A Danish man of 25.

Ship’s Cook and Captain’s Steward: Edward William Head. 23 years old. Not part of the deck-crew, his job is to provide good, wholesome food for the captain, his family, and for the crew of six, strong young men whose job it is to sail the ship safely across the Atlantic Ocean. The remaining crew are four German sailors:

Volkert Lorenson (29), Boy Lorenson (23), Arian Martens (35), and Gottlieb Godenschall (23).

Discovery of the Ship

As if by fate, the ship that stumbled across the Mary Celeste was the cargo-ship Dei Gratia, loaded with petroleum and bound for Europe. It had left New York on the 15th of November, sailing East-by-North. It too, had had a rather unremarkable, and ordinary voyage. It was on a southerly tack that the ship’s helmsman, John Johnson, noticed something out of the ordinary.

Let’s be honest. Standing in front of a ship’s wheel for hours and hours and hours on end…is…boring.

So what would you do?

You’d find ways to distract yourself from your boredom.

For a helmsman at sea, the best way to distract yourself was to go sightseeing.

Johnson, probably bored with standing at the ship’s wheel for ages, popped out his telescope and had a peek around the ship. Eventually, his peekings glanced in a southerly direction, off the starboard side of the ship. It was at this point that he noticed a ship several miles away. Even at that distance, he could guess that something was wrong. It was not so much ‘sailing’ as it was just ‘floating’. It sloshed around and only seemed to be making a show of keeping to some sort of course. It wasn’t sailing, it was yawing. ‘Yawing’ is when a ship’s bow swings from side to side as it moves forwards. No ship with someone in control of it would ever do that, since the bow would always be pointed straight ahead. Johnson knew at once that something was up, and called Second Mate, John Wright to have a look.

Wright agreed that the ship was acting weird, and together, they alerted the captain.

The captain ordered the ship turned southwards so that it would meet up with the phantom vessel. When they were within shouting distance, the captain took out his telescope to have another look. He recognised the ship at once as the Mary Celeste.

How could he do that? Not just by the name painted on the bow, but because he’d actually seen the ship at anchor in New York! The captain was David R. Morehouse, the man who had dined with Captain Briggs on the night before the Mary Celeste’s departure.

To say that Capt. Morehouse was surprised was to put it lightly. The Mary Celeste had a ten day head-start on its voyage! It should already be docked at the Italian city of Genoa by now! …Instead, it was floating around like a tin cup in the middle of the ocean…

As they drew even closer, they noticed nobody in the rigging…on deck…and nobody manning the ship’s wheel. By now seriously perplexed, Captain Morehouse ordered First Mate, Oliver Deveau overboard. Deveau lowered one of the Dei Gratia’s lifeboats and rowed across to the Mary Celeste. He made his boat fast against the side of the ship and climbed aboard.

He called out for the captain, his wife, and the crew…but nobody answered. With the Dei Gratia sailing alongside, Deveau began making an examination of the ship.

First, you have to understand that the Mary Celeste is not an isolated incident. Ships were found abandoned in the middle of the ocean on a regular basis. Deveau’s examination of the ship was to determine whether or not it was seaworthy enough to sail it back to land. If he could, then he and the rest of the Dei Gratia’s crew would get salvage-money! By law, any persons who found an abandoned ship at sea in usable condition, and returned it to land, was entitled to salvage-payment. Salvage-payment being a paid out as a cut of the ship’s insurance-claim.

But as Deveau explored the ship, he found more and more things curiously wrong. He, and other subsequent investigators noted that…

– The ship’s one lifeboat was missing, its davits empty.
– Two of the ship’s three hatch-covers were open to the sea.
– The hatch to the hold was sealed and shut.
– The ship’s cargo, highly flammable alcohol, was tied down and secure and undamaged.
– Nine of the 1,704 barrels had sprung leaks. Alcohol had dribbled out of them.
– Two of the ship’s three emergency water-pumps were out-of-action.
– The ship’s papers, apart from the logbook, were missing.
– The ship’s chronometer (sea-clock used for navigation) was also missing.
– The ship’s sextant (another navigational-aid) was also missing.
– The ship’s stove in the galley (kitchen) had been shifted from its foundations.
– There was a 3ft-depth of water in the ship’s bilge.
– Most, if not all, of the crew and passengers’ personal possessions had been left behind.
– The glass shield over the ship’s compass was smashed to pieces.
– The ship flew no distress-flags of any kind.
– The ship carried no alcohol at all (Capt. Briggs was a teetotaler), except for its cargo.
– The ship’s provisions of water, food and essential supplies were undamaged.
– A single length of rope trailed off the ship into the water.

Captain Morehouse did not understand at all. He knew Captain Briggs well. He had been his personal friend for years. They’d eaten dinner together just a few weeks before! He knew Briggs to be a steadfast, intelligent man of sound mind. Religious and a teetotaler. And yet, he, his wife, his child and all of their crew had left the ship, gotten into the lifeboat and just gone!

Why?

The ship was in no danger of sinking. The ship had not had a fire onboard. The ship’s cargo was not in any immediate danger. There was six months’ worth of food, fresh water and other provisions stored safely away below deck. It was all unspoiled and perfectly good for eating. What would make a seasoned seaman, an experienced set of crew and a hardy and trusting wife leave a perfectly good ship and trust their lives to a small, wooden, six-oared lifeboat?

Neither Captain Morehouse, nor any of his crew could figure out why.

After a thorough examination of the ship, First Mate Oliver Deveau determined that…apart from the water sloshing around in the bottom of the ship, which could easily be pumped out…the vessel was in no immediate danger of sinking, fire, breaking up, or any other potential emergency.

Captain Morehouse decided to claim salvage rights on the ship. He ordered a skeleton crew aboard the Mary Celeste, and escorted the mystery ship to the Mediterranean Sea.

On the 13th of December, 1872, the Mary Celeste and the Dei Gratia arrived at Gibraltar. At once, an inquiry was held into the condition of the ship, its cargo, its insurance, and of course…the mystery surrounding its lack of crew and passengers.

The Admiralty Court in Gibraltar questioned, examined, cross-examined and interrogated every witness they could find. This included Captain Morehouse, his officers, and James Winchester, principal owner of the ship (of which the late Capt. Briggs was a partner).

Hundreds of questions were asked about the captain, the crew, the crew of the salvaging vessel, the type and condition of the cargo, conditions onboard the ship, and what might possibly have caused an experienced captain, his family and crew, to abandon a perfectly sound vessel.

Theories of the Mary Celeste

There are as many theories about what happened to the passengers and crew of the Mary Celeste as there are hairs on your head (or grains of sand on the beach, if you happen to be bald).

I won’t list them all here, but they ranged from the possible, the plausible, to the outright ludicrous. Everything from krakens (giant, squid-like sea-monsters), to the Bermuda Triangle, to the Black Death and pirates.

What REALLY happened will of course, never be known. All we can surmise is what we can gleam from the evidence. But what were some of the theories that were put forward, both at the time, and later on?

Piracy

An obvious theory. Pirates attacked the ship. They kidnapped and/or killed everyone onboard, and then sailed off.

But why did they take the ship’s chronometer? It was a valuable scientific instrument. Maybe they hoped to sell it. But why the sextant? Surely they had their own. And what about all the charts, maps and documents?

On top of this, there was no violence seen onboard. No blood, no gunshots, no damage to the ship other than what might be caused by the sea. Under the captain’s bed, his sword remained sheathed and unused. Surely if the ship was attacked, he would’ve used it to defend his family and men?

Any valuables that the ship might have held were untouched. Jewellery, men’s personal effects such as their pipes, clothing, pocketwatches, rings, money…were all left as they were. In the captain’s cabin, Mrs. Brigg’s sewing-machine, in the 1870s, a valuable piece of household equipment, sat untouched. A dress that she was making for her daughter was still laid on it, the thread unbroken.

Sea Monsters!

Another popular one. This theory supposes that a giant squid, octopus, kraken or other equally horrific and ugly sea-creature attacked the ship and snatched off all its crew and passengers, which it then either drowned or ate.

Fascinating…but unfounded. If it was a sea-monster…why was the ship’s lifeboat missing? Why was the ship’s master timekeeper, it’s chronometer, gone? Why was half the captain’s paperwork missing from his desk? And the sextant? A sea-monster would have no need for such things.

Mutiny and Drunkeness

Perhaps the crew mutinied against the captain and his family, killing them, dumping them overboard and then sailing off in the lifeboat?

But then why didn’t they take clothes? And food? Money?

On top of that, the captain was sailing with his wife and young child. He wouldn’t have just Shanghaiied a bunch of men, chucked them onboard ship and sailed off across the ocean. Indeed, the crew were carefully chosen for their temperaments, skills and experience. Furthermore, Capt. Briggs was a teetotaler. There was not a drop of alcohol aboard his ship, apart from the barrels in the hold. And the alcohol there was of an industrial quality, quite unfit for regular consumption. Although it’s not mentioned anywhere what it was, it’s likely that it was methanol, a highly concentrated alcohol that would’ve been toxic to humans.

The Bermuda Triangle!

Absolute rot.

The Bermuda Triangle is located off the south coast of North America, several hundreds, thousands of miles, from the course and position of the Mary Celeste.

Seaquake!

One of the more plausible theories, although not one given very much serious consideration back in the 1870s, was that of a seaquake.

A seaquake is like an earthquake. Except…it…happens at sea. This theory supposed that the ship sailed over a seismically active area of the sea. Without warning, the tectonic plates shifted. The resulting abrasion sent off shockwaves through the water, which threw the ship around. Fearing for their lives, the passengers and crew dropped everything, boarded the lifeboat and sailed off!

The Azores, the last recorded sighting of land in the ship’s log on the 25th of November, is a seismically unstable part of the ocean. The Azores themselves were formed of volcanos and earthquakes. Such a jolt might explain why the ship’s stove, a solid iron structure bound to weigh several dozen pounds, was thrown off its mountings.

But ships are designed to cope with stuff like this. And even if the ship had sprung a leak, it had three pumps to drive the water out! Abandoning ship was done only as an absolute last resort. A captain such as Briggs would have to have had a truly stupendous reason for abandoning ship. And his vessel being rocked around a bit by the waves was not deemed sufficiently life-threatening to allow this to happen.

Fume Explosion

The theory given the most credence by the evidence, apart from the possible seaquake one, is that of an alcoholic explosion.

This theory supposed the following:

Faulty barrels stored within the ship’s hold sprang a leak. When the ship was discovered, nine barrels of the 1,704 were found to be leaking or empty.

The alcohol within the barrels, no-longer contained, spread out across the floor of the hold, which was tightly sealed to prevent damage from water. Fumes from the alcohol seeped throughout the ship. This possibly caused a panic. Capt. Briggs was not used to transporting such dangerous substances such as alcohol…in fact, this was the first time he’d done so!

To prevent a potential explosion, from the alcohol-fumes coming in contact with a spark or naked flame, or possibly, because of a naked flame igniting the fumes, fear of, or the result of an explosion blew off two of the hatch-covers.

Fearing for their lives and the safety of the ship, the captain, crew and the captain’s family lowered the ship’s lifeboat into the water. There might be a fire onboard caused by the deadly alcohol fumes. The captain took with him what he judged to be the most important documents, along with the ship’s marine-clock. In the panic, he forgot the logbook.

The boat was secured to the side of the ship with a rope. Once the fumes had dissipated and the danger had passed, the decision would be made to pull on the line and draw the boat back to the ship and resume their journey.

During the wait, the rope securing the boat to the ship snapped or came undone, possibly due to a change in the wind, or a storm. The ship, being under sail, would be moving too fast for the occupants of the boat to catch up with it using the lifeboat’s oars. The passengers and crew of the Mary Celeste would’ve drifted rapidly out of sight of the ship, and would’ve either been wrecked near the Azores, drowned in the Atlantic, or died of starvation and dehydration in the packed lifeboat.

This engraving of the Mary Celeste, made according to witness testimonies, shows how the ship’s sails were set when the vessel was found adrift. In their haste to abandon ship, for fear of a fume-explosion, not all the sails were trimmed. This left the ship with enough surface-area to pick up significant amounts of speed if the strength of the wind increased, causing the single lifeline that held the lifeboat to the ship to snap under the strain, setting the ship’s passengers and crew adrift in the open ocean.

The Inquiry into the Mary Celeste

Shortly after the two ships, the salvager and the salvaged, reached Gibraltar, an inquiry into the Mary Celeste disaster was held at the Admiralty Court by the British Royal Navy. Witnesses, experts, sailors, friends, business-partners and acquaintances were all questioned and interrogated. It was a slow, frustrating process.

Not least of all because of a man who’s name was Flood.

Frederick Solly-Flood, to be precise.

Frederick Solly-Flood was the Attorney-General of Gibraltar at the time.

During the inquiry, the judge listened acutely to everything that was told, and praised the crew of the Dei Gratia for their attention to detail, their bravery and skill in rescuing the ship (if not it’s crew and passengers), and bringing it safely back to land.

Frederick Flood, however, had his own agenda.

Flood was hell-bent on proving that the passengers and crew of the Mary Celeste had all met with some horrible, violent, bloody end. It was he who first suggested the theory of a drunken mutiny. He even rowed out to the ship to find evidence!

He found the broken, leaking barrels, the alcohol, the captain’s sword and cut-marks along the railings. He proposed the theory that the crew got at the alcohol, drank themselves blind, murdered the captain, his wife, his daughter, his first mate, chucked them all overboard, then got into the lifeboat and rowed…away…from a perfectly good ship…

…Yeah it kinda…fell to pieces in court.

Indeed, not a single piece of ‘evidence’ that Flood submitted was found to be what it was! The barrels were empty because they were leaking (they’d been built of red oak, a porous wood which would’ve explained the empty barrels). The damage to the railings? Ropes rubbing across the wood.

The blood on the captain’s sword?

It wasn’t blood. It wasn’t even the captain’s sword…that sword was stored under his bed! The sword that Flood found was an old, rusty knife lying on the deck. Scientists examined the blade and determined that the red substance on it was nothing but rust and old paint. It was probably used to lever open paint-cans and stir coagulated paint around!

Flood dreamed up even more insane theories. He suggested that Capt. Briggs had drawn Capt. Morehouse into an insurance fraud of some sort and that they were both in this together. Perhaps Briggs tricked his family and crew off the ship, hid somewhere on an island, while Morehouse found the abandoned ship, towed it away, took all the money, and then when the storms had died down, gave half of it to Briggs?

The idea was so preposterous that it was considered insulting and was denied by Capt. Morehouse and his officers.

Yet another madcap idea Flood proposed to the court was that it had been the crew of the Dei Gratia themselves, who had dispatched the crew of the Mary Celeste, along with the three members of the Briggs family…another theory that fell on deaf ears!

But the damage was done!

Crime-fever swept around the world! The idea that a madman had killed the entire ship’s company and then stole away in the ship’s one boat, captured the imagination of thousands, millions of people!

The alcohol-fumes explosion theory, which was put forward at the inquiry by none other than the Mary Celeste’s owner and principal shareholder, James Winchester, was disregarded as fanciful rot! Flood’s ruthless questioning, cross-questioning and wild accusations had painted a red mark over the memory of the Mary Celeste.

After the Inquiry

In the end, Capt. Morehouse did get…some…of the salvage-money that he hoped to receive from returning his late friend’s ship safely to land, but he never got all of it. In total, he received about 1,700 pounds sterling. As for the Mary Celeste? She was deemed to be a cursed ship. She passed from owner to owner to owner, before finally being burned and wrecked on the coast of Haiti in 1885…this time, in a real insurance fraud!

The Mary Celeste was not an isolated incident. Back then, before the days of the internet, cellphones and wireless radio, ships regularly went missing out at sea for various reasons, and were never seen from again, or were found, abandoned. But what made this ship so famous?

In a word, the mystery. WHY did the crew, the captain and his family flee the vessel in such haste, entrusting their lives to a tiny lifeboat? What happened to them? Where did they end up? How did they die? Why did they do what they did, if the ship was in no danger?

The stories of the ship that leaked out of Gibraltar and which were telegraphed around the world as fast as cables could send them, and which were splashed across the newspapers of the day, made the ship famous. And not least of all because of a story that appeared in a literary magazine of the age.

In 1884, a short story appeared in the Cornhill Magazine.

The Cornhill was not some soppy farthing-rag that tittery housewives bought and which grandmothers used to line bird-cages with. It was a famous and well-respected literary journal. Some of the biggest names in 19th century literature started off writing to this magazine. Names like…Charlotte Bronte…Thomas Hardy…George Eliot!…Alfred Lord Tennyson!

In 1884, a short story appeared in the Cornhill Magazine. It was unsigned and submitted anonymously to the magazine, but was published nonetheless. It was given the rather flashy title of “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement“, supposedly, a true story about a ship found abandoned at sea. The ship was called the “Marie Celeste“, and it had been found floating around in the middle of the ocean with nobody onboard. Hot food was still on the table in the galley. Tea was still steaming in the teacups. The lifeboat was lashed to the deckhouse roof. A bottle of machine-oil was left balancing on a sewing-machine in the captain’s cabin. But there was nobody there!

Sound familiar?

The story was supposed to be a fictional account of something that never really happened. It was inspired by, but was not written about, the mystery of the Mary Celeste. How do we know this? Because the story’s author was a rather famous person, you know…

At the time of writing it and submitting it to the Cornhill Magazine, the author was a struggling Scottish physician. A general practitioner of the medical sciences, who had no patients, little money, a lot of time and who was incredibly, incredibly bored.

If you’d gone to the doctor’s surgery, the plaque you might’ve seen nailed on the front door probably read something like this:

“Dr. A. C. Doyle. Consultant Physician”

It was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of the famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, who wrote that story! Perhaps foreshadowing his great success as a mystery writer, Doyle’s ghost-ship story was so incredible that people thought it was real! It wasn’t, of course, but it was that story which captured the world’s imagination, and which kept the mystery of the Mary Celeste alive to this day.

Whatever happened to Capt. Briggs, his crew, the ship’s cook, Mrs. Briggs, and little Sophia Briggs?

Nobody will ever know.

What caused them to abandon a perfectly good ship and risk their lives in an open rowboat in the middle of the ocean?

Nobody will ever know.

There has been all kinds of conjecture about the fate of the Mary Celeste’s passengers and crew, but just like the colour of the Queen’s underpants, it’s something that we’ll never know.

03/05/2012 by scheong

The King and “Mrs. Simpson” – The Abdication Crisis of 1936

We’ve all seen that movie ‘The King’s Speech’. We all know what it’s about. We all know about the struggles, trials, tribulations and torments that surrounded King George VI, the man who never wanted to be king, but who guided his country through one of the darkest periods in British history.

But all that would never have happened, and the film would never have taken place, if not for the very remarkable event that preceded it. The famous Abdication Crisis of 1936.

What Was the Abdication Crisis?

The Abdication Crisis of 1936 was the royal scandal of King Edward VIII abdicating the British throne to marry the woman he loved. Romantic? Perhaps. Scandalous? Certainly. Next to the rise of Nazism in Germany, it was the biggest talking-point all around Europe during the 1930s. In drawing-rooms, living-rooms, cafes, restaurants, boardrooms and down at the pub, people talked of little else except for the king and…’Mrs Simpson’.

Who Was King Edward VIII?

King Edward the Eighth is a figure shrouded in mystery. He was king for barely a year, he was known as a playboy, a dandy, a moderniser and a scoundrel. But who was he, really?

Edward VIII, full name…*deep breath*…Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David…was born on the 23rd of June, 1894, when his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, was on the throne.

Edward was the first of six children to the future King George V, and Queen Mary (formerly Mary of Teck). The other five kids were the future King George VI, Princess Mary, Prince Henry, Prince George, the Duke of Kent, and last but not least, the forgotten prince…John, who died at the age of 13 from the effects of epilepsy…a closely guarded royal shame and secret.

Life for the royal children was hardly the idyllic dream that we imagine it to be. And as we all know from horror movies, TV shows and the local tabloid news, those people who grow up to torture people in their secret underground lairs…like Joseph Fritzl…are almost invariably those who had horrible childhoods.

George V, rigid, formal and stiff to the last, instilled his children with naval discipline (it was, and still is a royal tradition for a prince to take up a posting in one of the armed forces), something that George himself had done with his older brother, Prince Albert-Victor (nicknamed ‘Eddie’), who died in the 1890s, with suspicions of him being Jack the Ripper and being as gay as Liberace still hanging around him.

George V once famously declared that: “My father was terrified of his father. I was terrified of my father. And my children are damn well going to be terrified of me!”

The two oldest brothers, Edward and Albert, the future George VI, were very close as children. They played, they spent time with each other, they hung out, they participated in sports (Albert or ‘Bertie’ was fond of hunting and fishing)…and they chased women.

The difference was that Albert chased after a society beauty. Her name was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon…the future Queen Mum.

King Edward, or as he was called at the time…’David’…chased after quite another kind of girl. In the end, he latched onto…Mrs. Simpson. Full name…

Wallis Warfield Simpson

She was born Bessie Wallis Warfield on the 19th of June, 1896. And almost from the start, scandal followed her everywhere.

Her first marriage was to Earl Winfield Spencer, a pilot in the U.S. Navy (the air-force at the time, not being a separate entity from the Navy and Army in the United States, as it was in England). It was during her marriage to Earl Spencer (1916-1927), that she travelled to Republican China. Wild rumors circulated that she attended whorehouses, brothels, bordellos, casinos, drinking-dens, and other disreputable establishments in the decadent and lively world of the Shanghai International Settlement in China, as well as other places in the Republic, such as the capital city of Peking (‘Beijing’ today).

Before she divorced Spencer, she suddenly got interested in another guy. Ernest Aldrich Simpson…from which the famous “Mrs. Simpson” comes from. She divorced Spencer in 1927, and married Simpson in 1928.

The Prince and Mrs. Simpson

In 1934, Mrs. Simpson effectively became the-then Prince Edward’s mistress. She wooed him, and he spent lavish amounts of money on her. The prince’s reputation as a playboy and a society mover-and-shaker made her sink her claws into him all the more.

By now, Wallis Simpson had already developed a bit of a reputation in the drawing-rooms of the British aristocracy and nobility. And everyone in-the-know began to whisper. The whisperings hit the ears of His Majesty, King George V, a notoriously straitlaced, uptight, old-fashioned, oldschool sort of monarch. He was furious and flat-out asked Prince Edward what the hell was going on!…Edward denied everything, even though royal courtiers brought the king secret reports that they had seen the prince and Mrs. Simpson sharing a bed together!

The Abdication Crisis of 1936

In January of 1936, King George V died. He was seventy years old. He was also full of conviction about two things.

ONE – That his second son, Prince Albert, was a hell of a boy with a lot of guts (not something he admitted to the prince’s face, of course).

TWO – That his older brother, the new King Edward VIII, would bring ruination to the monarchy with his involvement with the Simpson woman.

Prince Edward rose to the throne as King Edward VIII. All is well and good.

Except that he kept hanging onto the Simpson woman. And she was becoming more and more unpopular by the minute. The Duke and Duchess of York (the future George VI and the Queen Mum) were appalled by this. The Duchess and the Queen Mother (that’s Queen Mary, George V’s wife), were horrified by the new king’s carryings-on with Mrs. Simpson.

Not only was Mrs. Simpson unpopular, but Edward wasn’t much of a king.

He swept aside centuries-old traditions and customs. He shied away from his duties. He fired courtiers who had worked in the palace for decades. He didn’t even bother to read, sign or approve any of the bills, papers and documents that were sent to him to read…something that the current Queen Elizabeth does on a regular basis. He was barely a king at all!

Courtiers, government officials, and prominent aristocrats, were displeased with his overly casual attitude, his dislike of formality, and increasingly, his pro-Nazism stance. But it all came to a head when he summoned the prime minister, at the time, Stanley Baldwin, to tell him that he would marry Wallis Simpson, and that if he couldn’t, and if she wouldn’t become queen, then he would abdicate the throne.

This caused a HUGE sensation.

Several people in government and court and within the royal family itself, were mightily opposed this. But surely a king can marry who he wants…can’t he?

The reasons why everyone thought he couldn’t, were several. For one…

Social Implications.

Someone of such high standing as a king could not POSSIBLY marry a woman who was twice divorced, and who’s previous husbands were not even dead yet. On top of that, Mrs. Simpson was an AMERICAN!…which in itself was probably enough! And those two elements combined would ensure that she would almost never been accepted by the British people!

Religious Implications.

Edward VIII, as king, was the head of the Church of England. All British monarchs since Henry VIII back in the 1500s, were heads of the Church of England…since it was Henry VIII who created it! So what’s the issue here?

The Church of England does allow divorces. And it does allow remarriages.

But it does NOT allow the both things to happen at once! For the King to marry a woman who was divorced, but who had two living ex-husbands, was to go against everything that the church allowed! And the King, as head of the church, could not possibly do that and escape unscathed from the immense public outcry that would follow!

Political Implications

On top of that, even if the king married Mrs. Simpson. Even if she became queen, there was still the issue of what would happen?

Mrs. Simpson had divorced twice in the past! What happened if she divorced again? From the king? As the queen? Such a thing would never have happened before in British history, and it would’ve been a disaster!

Don’t start quoting Henry VIII here. His marriages were “annulled”, not “divorced”. He had them struck off the records, not just terminated.

Legal Implications

At the time, divorce proceedings between Mr. and Mrs. Simpson were not yet complete. And she had divorced her first husband, Mr. Earl Spencer, on grounds of “emotional incompatibility”. Under the Church of England, divorce was legal, but in England at the time, the only grounds for divorce lay in the act of adultery. Since adultery had not been committed, Mrs. Simpson’s divorce from her first husband wouldn’t hold water in an English courthouse. So even if she divorced her second husband, she would, in the eyes of the English legal system, still be married to her first. And if she was, then marrying the King would be a bigamous act, something that was obviously…illegal in England.

Nationalistic Inplications

The KING. The head of the United KINGdom…marry a lowly, disgusting, vile, peasantish, twice-divorced American slut!?

Such a thing would NEVER have worked out.

Although generally friendly, the United Kingdom and the United States were not yet the close chums and allies that we imagined them to be during the War years. The idea that the King should marry an American, whom most people in England saw as distasteful and just plain…WRONG, was repellent to the British aristocracy…and to just about every other class in the British system from that tier down!

On top of that, the Americans all seemed to be jumping on the idea that one of their lot, a Yankee girl, would become a British queen! The press was all over it!…and the Brits were getting all over her. No way was this ever going to work!

With all the uproar over this potential marriage, there were three possible avenues open to the King and his lover.

1. He marries her, she marries him. He remains king, she becomes queen.

No. Nobody wanted that (except maybe the King). It just wasn’t possible.

2. He marries her, she marries him. He remains king, she takes on some lesser aristocratic title.

Called a morganatic marriage, this was the style of marriage used to join a husband of higher rank or social status, to a woman of lower rank or social status. She wouldn’t get his titles or anything, but she would still be his wife. Such a thing had never happened in England (although it had happened in various royal houses in Europe), and it still…wasn’t going to happen. The king refused to accept this as an option.

3. He marries her. She marries him. He gives up the throne.

Ding!

This was the one!

On the 10th of December, the King formally abdicated the British throne. The first…last…and only…British monarch to willing do so in history. He signed this document, the Instrument of Abdication, in the presence of his brothers, who signed as witnesses to this historic event.

On the top right, you can see “Edward R.I.” (short for “Edward Rex Imperator” or ‘Edward, King-Emperor’, in Latin).

Below, you can see three more names: “Albert”, “Henry”, and “George”. In order, they are the future King George VI, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Prince George, Duke of Kent.

And so it was done. To this day, Edward VIII has had the shortest reign of any British monarch, in the history of the British monarchy. Unless you count the ‘reign’ of Lady Jane Grey, otherwise known as the “Nine Day Queen“, who was supposed to be the protestant successor to Edward VI, son of King Henry VIII.

The Effects of the Abdication

The Abdication, the first in the history of the British monarchy, destroyed the family. Once close as children, the new King George VI would now not even look at his brother, much less speak to him…and let’s not even mention Wallis Simpson! When the abdication was complete, and Prince Albert now realised that he would become the new king, and now fully understood that it was his own brother’s recklessness that had ended him up in this shitpile that he NEVER wanted to be in, he cried on the shoulders of his elderly mother, Queen Mary, for a full hour at her home at Marlborough House.

Prince Albert NEVER wanted to be king. He hated the whole idea of the job. It was his grandfather, Edward VII, the rakish son of Queen Victoria, who was the first royal to realise that for a monarchy to survive in the 20th century, things had to change. They had to do things differently.

Things like…attend openings. Give presentations. Cut ribbons. Pose for photographs. Greet famous celebrities. And worst of all…make speeches!

From childhood, Albert had suffered from a horrible and crippling stutter which, even with decades of therapy from his faithful friend and speech-therapist, Lionel Logue, he was never fully cured of. If you listen to any of George VI’s speeches, or watch any of his newsreel footage from the 1940s, you can still hear how bad his stutter was.

Ironically, this was not the first time that this had happened.

Just as Prince Albert was shoved into the limelight and jammed in the throne thanks to the actions of his older brother, so was his father, the late King George V, also shoved into the limelight. When his older brother, the Prince Albert Victor (the ‘Jack the Ripper’ suspect) died, the-then Prince George was shoved onto the stage, and even had to marry his dead brother’s prospective bride, the Princess Mary…which wasn’t that bad, because they actually loved each other quite devotedly…but it’s funny how history repeats itself. The scandalous older brother screws things up, and the younger, more intelligent one has to set right the incredible cock-up that was made as a result.

On the 11th of December, 1936, less than a year after his reign began, Edward VIII approached a microphone in a radio broadcasting-booth to announce to the world his abdication from the British throne, the first and only abdication in the history of the monarchy and the first real interruption to the line of succession since the Civil War of the 1640s. The announcer introduced the speaker as “His Royal Highness, Prince Edward”, since he was no longer officially king of England. The full speech made by the king may be heard here:

Once a popular, handsome, athletic celebrity, within a year, Prince Edward’s public…and private…image, had changed from one of the ideal royal prince, the heartthrob and glittering celebrity, to that of a second-rate king, who chose the love of a conniving, manipulative, gold-digging Yank over his much more important duties as king of a great nation in the years leading up to the Second World War.

Immediately after the abdication, the Duke of Windsor, as he was then styled, and his eventual wife, Wallis Simpson, left England for Europe. They were married on the 3rd of June, 1937. Had George V lived, it would’ve been his 72nd birthday. The furious Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, strongly suspected that her son chose this particular date for his wedding as a slight against the rest of his family, who had effectively disowned him for his disgraceful actions.

For the rest of his life, the Duke of Windsor, and his wife, the Duchess of Windsor, were not welcome in England. When Edward’s brother Albert ascended the throne as George VI, he refused to grant Wallis Simpson, by then Duchess of Windsor, the traditional “H.R.H” (‘Her Royal Highness’) form of address for a royal duchess. Edward was furious about this. Although only three little letters, their addition to the front of Wallis’s name (which would then read: “Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Windsor’), would mean that she was officially part of the British Royal Family. This would mean that people would have to bow and curtsy to her, as such. George VI did not believe (and neither did his wife, or mother believe) that she deserved such privileges, and so denied her the form of address which his brother so vehemently wanted.

King George VI died in 1952. During the war he became an incredibly heavy smoker and drinker, with stress-levels shooting through the roof. The stress, combined with the other tolls taken on his body meant that he was dead before he was even sixty years old. By contrast, his brother continued to live the carefree, playboy life that he’d always done. He died in 1972 at the age of 77. Wallis Simpson in 1986 at the age of 89.

26/04/2012 by scheong

Momentos of the Past – Restoring My Grandmother’s Singer 99k Sewing Machine

This is a little outside the normal realm of what I post on this blog, but I figured it might make interesting reading.

The Backstory

My grandmother was born on the 7th of May, 1914, in Singapore. She was a first-generation Chinese-Singaporean, her parents having migrated to Singapore from southern China. She had a mere five years’-worth of education at an English-language school in what was then Singapore Town, from 1921-1926.

She married my grandfather during the Second World War in 1943.

When the War ended, she occupied herself in looking after her husband’s three children by his first marriage. In 1953, she opened her own dressmaking and tailoring shop, in the Malaysian town of Batu Pahat. She shared the premises with a women’s beauty-salon, and consequently, it was called the ‘Kam Seng Beauty Parlour‘ (Kam Seng is Cantonese. It means ‘Golden Star‘).

When my grandmother opened her shop, she was gifted a beautiful, and brand-new sewing-machine. She used that machine for every single one of the thirty years that she ran her shop, and when my grandfather died in May, 1983, she closed the shop, retired, and immigrated to Australia.

She brought the machine with her, and continued to use it almost every single day, up until about 2003. She repaired clothes for friends, she took in alterations from her church-group, and she repaired the many rips and tears in clothing that will come from it being worn by two lively grandsons…one of them was me.

Gran and her sewing-machine were inseparable. I remember when my father purchased her a modern machine, she barely touched it, and went back to using her Singer. She was always a bit set in her ways, and while she was more receptive to other modern technologies (at the age of 85, she knew how to use Microsoft Word, type, and print on a computer), she was absolutely dead-set that the only machine she would ever use for sewing was her own.

Around 2000-2003 (I forget exactly when), my grandmother had to move into a nursing-home. Her Alzheimer’s Disease had become too much of a liability and a risk to house her safely at home. Alzheimer’s is a horrible, crippling illness. Unless they’ve seen it firsthand and had to deal with it for years on end, don’t believe anyone who tells you that “I understand” when you talk about Alzheimers…because they don’t. Unless they’ve seen it, or studied it, or treated it…they really don’t.

When gran moved to the nursing-home, her sewing-machine was put downstairs in the basement, where it has sat for the past 10 years.

My grandmother died on the 28th of November, 2011, at the impressive age of 97.

With her gone, and my father and I constantly discussing antiques and heirlooms and him telling me all the stuff that his family used to own, but which they don’t anymore, because they were thrown out, but which today would be worth a pretty penny…my mind was drawn towards gran’s sewing-machine.

That machine was her life. She carried it EVERYWHERE with her and it was her baby. She would let nobody else touch it (except me, because I used to set it up for her every morning. The machine weighs 31lb, 4oz…about 15kg…and it wasn’t easy for an seven-year-old boy to haul that thing around!). Now that she was gone, we had nothing left to remind us of gran, except her sewing-machine.

With all of my father’s stories ringing around in my ears, I began to wonder what would happen?

That machine was gran’s mainstay and anchor and rock for 50 years, or over half her life. And it was the one machine that represented her character and told her life-story better than anything else. Tough, simple, elegant, stubborn and impossible to destroy.

Be there as it may, I knew that it wasn’t going to last long rotting downstairs in the basement. So I decided to haul it out of that godforsaken hole in the ground, and restore it to a level where it was once again a functional piece of machinery.

STEP ONE – Cleaning the Machine

Carrying it as carefully as I could, I hauled gran’s Singer…because that’s what it is…out of the basement. It was locked up tightly inside the curved ‘Bentwood’ case, cocooned by wood and shrouded in the dust of a decade. I cleaned off the dust and then set about opening the case.

The cases are held onto the machine-bases by very simple, but surprisingly effective locks. Without a key, these cases are literally impossible to open. I squirted some oil into the lock and while I waited for it to settle, I went off to find the one tool that I would need to open the case.

Not the key, that was long gone.

A 3mm flat-head screwdriver.

If anyone reading this has ever tried to open a Singer bentwood case but doesn’t have the key…pay close attention…

The profile of a 3mm flat-head screwdriver perfectly fits the keyhole of a Singer bentwood case’s lock. A few generous squirts of oil, a few minutes of waiting, then I shoved the screwdriver, horizontally, into the lock. I turned it clockwise 90 degrees, until the lock was in the vertical “Unlocked” position.

Then, I shifted the whole top of the case to the left about a quarter of an inch. This is to disengage the other bolt or latch, which secures the right side of the case to the machine-base (the lock with the key is always on the left), and then lifted it up.

Here’s the bentwood case:

Here’s the keyhole:

That rectangular thing is the keyhole. It’s 1mm high by 3mm wide. You can also see the bolt underneath, that you have to throw over, to unlock the case

And this was the machine as it looked when I broke open the pharaoh’s tomb:

I’m no expert with sewing-machines. I just like old, vintage, antique-y things. And this is the closest thing we have in my family to an heirloom, so I decided almost immediately, to try and get it running again.

In all honesty, this thing probably hasn’t been serviced by your friendly local Singer Man since it left the factory back in 1950. I had no idea what I was getting myself in for, but I started, anyway.

‘Singer Manufacturing Company’ factory; Kilbowie, Clydebank, Scotland, U.K (Photo ca. 1901).
Gran’s machine was made here

First, I had to clean out all the gunk and fluff and crap that was inside the machine. Over the decades, this machine built up an enormous amount of dust and fluff, lint, loose thread, dead insects, coagulated oil and other…crap!…which rendered it totally unusable. I basically had a really awesome boat-anchor sitting on the living-room floor.

So, off with the face-plate…

The faceplate is that pretty steel plate with all the patterns on it that you see in the photo above. It was held on by one screw, and one nut. Somewhere in there is a bad joke…

Behind the plate is the crankshaft mechanism that powers the needle-bar (along with everything else in the machine apart from the light). It looks like this:

It’s quite simple, really. The crank turns around. It simultaneously lifts the needle-bar and lowers the uptake-lever (that’s the doohickey sticking out on the right with the hole in it), and then does the opposite when it completes one revolution.

As you see it there, the machine was completely immovable. It was covered in gunk and crud that I had to pick out with tweezers and wipe down with tissues to remove. It’s not just taking out the Dyson or the Hoover and sucking all the crap out of the machine…a vacuum-cleaner wouldn’t be able to remove 90% of the gunk inside here, because it’s stuck in really inaccessible places which only tweezers are able to reach, like behind levers, rods, shafts and plates.

Once that was done, I then had to tackle the handwheel assembly, at the other end of the machine. The handwheel is this big shiny wheel:

The handwheel spins around thanks to a belt-drive wrapped around it, which hooks up to the machine-motor at the back. You can see it here:

That black lump at the bottom left is the machine-motor. Above it, you can see the black light-shade. To the left of the lightshade is the drive-belt that runs the machine.

Anyway, I digress. I had to remove the clutch-wheel, also called the stop-motion wheel, which is that silvery wheel in the middle of the handwheel. You might notice that it’s held on by a single, but surprisingly effective screw, which took quite a while to loosen up. Once it was loose and I could unscrew the clutchwheel, I was confronted with this enchanting scene:

This is a part of the machine that NEVER sees the light of day, and yet it’s full of fluff, lint, gunk, dried oil and other crap. This is why complete disassembly of the machine was necessary…it’s this stuff that stops it from running, because it jams up the works. I took off the washer (that’s the doughnut with the three nubs sticking off it), and cleaned it, the crankshaft and the wheel, thoroughly. This is what it looked like when I was done:

This is the other (non-shiny) side of the clutch-wheel, with the washer sitting on top of it:

If you’re reading this as a guide on how to clean and fix your Singer (provided it’s the same model that I have!), you’ll notice that there’s a little nub sticking out of the clutch-wheel, around the 9 o’clock position. That’s the screw that holds the clutch-wheel onto the larger handwheel. It’s sticking out there because it doesn’t (and is not supposed to) be removed entirely from the clutch-wheel. It’ll unscrew a few milimeters and then it will stop. Do NOT force it…you won’t achieve anything at all, and what you want to have achieved (which is removal of the clutch-wheel) should be well within your capabilities by then.

Anyway, next step was to clean the bobbin-mechanism:

The bobbin mechanism is what holds the…bobbin. The bobbin being that shiny steel spool with the three big holes and the one small hole in it. It’s what feeds the thread to the underside of the machine to make the classic lockstitch.

Oh, and a warning note here…

See that nice fluffy red felty cloth on the right?

If you’re fixing, cleaning or repairing a sewing-machine, and you see the felt…

LEAVE IT ALONE!!!

The felt is your friend. It is there for a purpose! So DO NOT touch it! Without the felt, you’d have the oscillating hook (that catches the thread and pulls it under the needle to make the lock part of the lockstitch) scraping against metal inside the machine, and that would wear everything down and eventually just break it.

Fortunately, I”d read this warning on another blog before commencing work on this machine, so no undue damage was done to the intricate inner workings of this Singer by my hands.

Once the topside of the machine was cleaned, polished and defluffed, I had to tackle the underside of the machine. To do that, I unscrewed this nut, and swung back this catch:

That allows me to lift up the whole machine and tilt it back on hinges to access the storage-compartment underneath the machine:

This handy little compartment is where you would store things like thread, spare needles, bobbins, the machine-manual and all that other stuff. But more importantly, it was where I could get my hands on this:

This is the other side of this:

And it had just as much fluff, crap and mostly…loose thread…as the topside did.

Once the entire machine was completely cleaned, inside and out, topside, downside, upside and underside, it was ready to oil it.

STEP TWO – Oiling the Machine

Singers were made to be idiot-proof and user-friendly. To that end, they are incredibly easy to use, and look after. Especially a machine like this. The next step was to oil the machine to unjam all those frozen pistons and rods and cranks. To do that, you need high-grade machine-oil. You can buy this stuff at sewing-shops, decent hardware shops and whatever. Ideally, you want sewing-machine-specific oil. But if you can’t get that, any really thin, runny, high-grade oil (which will work for sewing-machines, and says so on the label), will do.

For this, I used SuperLube machine-oil.

And a LOT of it.

It took about an hour to fully lubricate the machine to the point where it would move as it once did. Oiling it is pretty easy. Just remember to squirt oil where-ever something moves. On a sewing-machine, that’s a surprisingly large number of places!

Fortunately for us, Singer thought about this, and provided us with these:

Those holes (next to the ‘T’ the ‘The‘ and under the ‘i’ in ‘Singer‘) are just two of several oiling-holes. You squirt or drip the oil down those holes to lubricate the machine!

What’s in there?

Why the crankshaft that runs the machine, of course! But before you do that, make sure you stick your needle-nosed tweezers down those holes first. There might be some unexpected surprises in there (like dead insects or dust, lint and fluff), that you don’t want to get all over the insides of your beautiful vintage sewing-machine.

Once the machine was generously oiled, I ran it by hand for several minutes to work the oil into the mechanism. You can do this easily by just turning the big, black and silver handwheel anticlockwise to work the mechanism. It doesn’t damage the machine, so don’t worry about that. Now that the machine was running, it was time for…

STEP THREE – Testing the Machine

This is a Singer 99k knee-lever machine made in Kilbowie, Clydebank, Scotland, in 1950. It’s called a knee-lever because it uses one of these to get it running:

That’s the knee-lever. And this is the socket that it slots into, on the right of the machine:

So, you plug in the power-cord, you stick in the weird, twisted “?”-shaped crank-thingy and you let ‘er rip!

And boy does it ever.

The machine was running like a jackhammer on steroids. In other words…perfectly!

Then, I had to make sure that, not only the sewing-mechanism was working, but that the bobbin-winding mechanism was working.

The bobbin-winder is this little thingo here:

It’s used to mechanically wind thread back onto the bobbin (that little steel thread-spool from further up in the posting) when the thread runs out. It turns a task that would take several minutes, into an event that’s over in about 30 seconds. You work the bobbin-winder by loosening the clutch-wheel (turning it anticlockwise), slotting a bobbin onto the rod:

Setting the release-lever against the bobbin (to stop it flying off the rod when this thing gets moving!), threading the bobbin, and then pressing the knee-lever to do the rest.

The automatic bobbin-winder will keep spinning, and the bobbin will keep filling, until such time as the thread in the bobbin fills up to such a level that it pushes away the release-lever. This automatically disengages the flywheel, which stops the mechanism dead in its tracks. And you have a full bobbin.

STEP FOUR – Accessorising the Machine

The next step was to accessorise the machine, or to find extra bits and bobs for it. These aren’t essential things, but they’re things that would be nice to have…like…extra needles…extra bobbins…original packaging…oil-cans…all that stuff. When the machine was brand new, it would’ve come with all kinds of nick-nacks and doodads and whizzle-whozzles that would’ve allowed the owner to attain a mastery of the machine good enough to make a suit.

I got lucky at the local flea-market and picked up a whole heap of needles and bobbins (eleven bobbins and two packs of original Singer needles) for a good price. Here they are, along with the one bobbin and the one Singer packet (with the one extra needle) that came along with my machine when I found it in the basement:

In time, I do hope to get other bits and pieces to make the machine more complete.

Along with the needles and bobbins, I got my hands on an original Singer bentwood key, for the case, kindly given to me by a friend…

“SIMANCO” is the “Singer Manufacturing Company”. The number next to it (96507) is the part-number for the key.

It was now that I also started looking at the bentwood case which housed this machine. It had all these weird little things inside it which I had no idea what they were for. That was when I found the bracket to hold the knee-bar:

This bracket is directly under the handle on the top of the case, and in the apex of the arch. You stick one end of the knee-bar into the socket on the left, then slot the rest of it into the slot on the right, and swing the catch (which will then go up and over the bar) to lock into place, to stop it wriggling around and falling off. Also inside the machine is a little black, wire bracket. It would have originally held a dome-shaped Singer oil-can, which would’ve looked like this:

Unfortunately, I don’t have a dome-shaped Singer oil-can (…yet…), but that’s what that bracket is there for, if you’ve ever wondered.

At the time of this posting, I’m still searching for extra bits and bobs and thingummies for the machine. If and when I find them, I’ll probably post about it here on the blog.

STEP FIVE – Replacement Parts

The next step was to find replacement parts…or to be precise, one part.

The part that goes here:

As you can see, the jerry-rig solution was a piece of balsa-wood held on with tape. Hardly the best substitute for the machine’s slide-plate, which is supposed to cover the bobbin-mechanism. Fortunately, I found a reproduction slide-plate (and yes, there are modern reproduction Singer parts), which I found on eBay (and that’s where you can get them, if you need them. There are also websites out there which sell original spare Singer parts. It’s just a matter of how desperate you are and what you want to pay). It was purchased on my behalf by my cousin, Hansen, who lives in Singapore, and which was hurried off to me with all due speed. It arrived…today, actually…and now the same part of the machine looks like this:

Yes, the slide-plate has a different metal-finish to the needleplate next to it, so they don’t match exactly, but it’s close enough for my purposes. And the important thing is that it fits and it does what it’s supposed to do!…Slide!:

All modern replacement slide-plates for Singer 99’s, 99k’s, 66’s, and 66k’s (and any other Singer models that take the square slide-plate…Singer parts were surprisingly interchangeable!) come in this same matte-finish, and not the shiny mirror-finish of the originals. But we should be thankful that there are reproduction plates at all!

The machine is now essentially complete. And I mean that literally..all the essential parts are present and correct. Needles, bobbins, plates, thread, machine-oil…the machine has been cleaned, oiled, tested, and it’s back to operational condition. I’m still after other Singer bits and pieces (attachments, extra feet, button-holers etc), but as it sits now, this machine will do, without any kind of hindrance, the task for which it was built when it left Scotland 60+ years ago…sew!

This is my grandmother’s Singer 99k knee-lever, as it appears now:

A Note on Construction

During this little adventure of mine, it occurred to me how fantastically-built these old Singers were. Of ALL the components on this machine, a grand-total of…FIVE…are made of something OTHER than cast iron, steel or wood. The plastic (bakelite?) shield on the steel light-shade…the lightbulb itself…the tire on the flywheel for the bobbin-winder, the drive-belt on the handwheel, and the power-cord and plug (also bakelite, I believe).

The Singer 99k was one of the MOST popular Singer machines ever made. They were produced from 1920 until 1962 and they’re incredibly simple, robust and powerful. Their simplicity is obvious. The motor is only there to power the drive-belt, and the light. Literally everything else on the machine is mechanical. And there’s no plastic on there at all. Nothing to crack…melt…warp…twist…shrink…expand…It just WORKS. I can’t think of a damn thing made today which was this solid when it was new, and which would still be that solid 60 years later. The Singer 99k was originally a handcranked model:

When it was released, it was a manual, hand-cranked machine, but an electrically-powered variation, with the knee-lever attachment, or the electric foot-pedal attachment (depending on variant, of course), were also available. These machines are so tough that they just NEVER break down. If you have an electrical one like I do, you might need to get the wiring checked if it’s spotty, but otherwise, they just never stop working.

And a Singer like the 66 or the 99/99k was a big investment. 11 pounds, 3s in 1930s Britain, or about a hundred and twenty dollars in America at the same time. Even in the 20s and 30s, a lot of people (mostly women) still made their own clothes, or clothes for their family, at home. Having a solid and dependable sewing-machine like a Singer was part an essential, and part a luxury, because their quality meant that they were priced pretty high. Even today, a sewing machine like my grandmother’s Singer 99k will easily sew through things like…

Denim.

Canvas.

Leather.

Multiple layers of cloth.

Things that would probably kill a modern machine…

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS

Here’s some additional photos of the machine, now that it’s complete:

The machine in its entirety!

The slide-plate doing what it does best – sliding!

The name of the beautiful pattern on the Singer 99k was called the ‘Filigree’

The Singer Manufacturing Company

More filigree!

Filigree + Plates!

Presser-foot, needle and feed-dogs (the little bumpy things)

09/04/2012 by scheong

A Stitch in Time – A History of the Sewing Machine

Open your closet.

Take out any article of clothing.

A shirt. A coat. A pair of trousers. A pair of boxer-shorts, a blouse, a waistcoat, a T-shirt, a singlet, a glove…anything!

Now take out a magnifying glass and count every single stitch on the garment you’ve selected.

Imagine for a minute that you had to remake this garment. By hand. And that every single one of those dozens…hundreds…thousands of stitches…all had to be done, painstakingly, by you. One at a time.

Even working as fast as you could, as neatly as you could, it would be an exhausting, eye-bending, finger-numbing process to even make a simple shirt, taking countless hours and days and weeks.

But imagine that there was a machine that could do this for you. Something that could make dozens of stitches, hundreds of stitches every minute. Every single one the same, every single one identical, every single one just as strong and as permanent and as unmovable as the one that preceded it.

Now wouldn’t that be nice?

This is the story of the remarkable machine that singlehandedly changed the clothing industry forever. It is called the sewing-machine.

Who Invented the First Machine?

The sewing-machine was first conceived in 1790. It was the brainchild of English cabinetmaker, Thomas Saint. It was a heavy-duty thing used to sew together leather and canvas, but it was a sewing-machine. No actual Saint-style sewing-machines survive (if indeed one ever made it off the drawing-board). It wasn’t until nearly 100 years later, in 1874, that another sewing-machine manufacturer (a man named William Newton Wilson), discovered Saint’s original schematic drawings, hidden away somewhere in the London Patent Office. Out of curiosity, Wilson copied Saint’s diagrams and built a working replica of Saint’s 1790 machine.

It’s still around today. You can see it at the London Science Museum. Here’s a photo of a copy of that reproduction, in a museum in Japan:

The world’s first sewing machine! This model of a Saint sewing machine sits in the Sewing Machine Museum, in Nagoya, Japan.

Developing the Machine

Over the next few decades, the sewing machine was altered, improved and updated by a successive number of inventors and mechanics. Much like with the weaving machines of the 1700s, the sewing machines of the 1800s were met with considerable…

…anger.

See, because sewing took SUCH a long time, if you did it by hand, tailors could make a lot of money, since not everybody could do the precise, time-consuming, eye-straining work that they did every single day.

But if you had a machine that could do this, suddenly, their edge was gone!

Terrified that they’d be out of business, French tailors went on a riot! A French tailor named Thimonnier patented a new kind of sewing-machine in the early 1830s. Was it a success?

Hardly.

His brethren were so enraged that he’d developed a machine to take over their prized and highly specialised craft that they went on the rampage! Thimonnier’s machine-factory was ransacked! The machines were smashed to pieces and the entire factory was destroyed! By the early 1840s, it was all over.

So much for the French attempts at a sewing machine.

The next player in this game was an American. Walter Hunt.

Hunt was an inventor. And a big one. Here’s a list…

– Sewing-machine
– Safety-pin
– Repeating rifle
– Knife-sharpener
– Streetcar bells
– Coal-fired stoves
– Street-sweepers
– Ice-and-snow ploughs
– The velocipede

For those people scratching their heads right about now, the velocipede was an early type of bicycle.

Hunt’s machine was interesting, but hardly practical. Due to a design-fault, the machine was more of a hindrance than a help. The feed-dogs didn’t work very well, and this held the machine up.

The feed-dogs are little teethed pieces of metal underneath the needle-plate. The needle-plate is the plate of steel directly underneath the needle. As the machine runs, the feed-dogs rub back and forth and their ribbed surfaces push the fabric along, tugging it between the needle-plate, and the foot-plate (the metal clamp that snaps down on top to hold the fabric in place to stop it sliding around). Ideally, the dogs would move back and forth ‘feeding’ fresh fabric under the needle (and between the needle-plate and foot-plate), while also passing the finished fabric out the other side of the machine.

Ingenious!

But Hunt’s machine didn’t have dogs that worked properly. Instead of the machine pushing the fabric through at a regular pace, the sewer had to do it instead. And this was slow, tricky, imprecise and very frustrating. For all of Hunt’s inventions, his sewing-machine was a failure.

The next man to come along was Elias Howe.

Howe’s entry into the sewing-machine was pretty interesting. Like everyone else, he was trying to figure out how to make a better, smoother machine with stronger, more permanent stitches that didn’t come apart so easily.

To achieve this, Elias Howe invented something that every single machine has today.

A needle with its eye (hole) near the tip of the needle, instead of near the head (which is where the eye usually is, for hand-sewing needles).

Legend has it that Howe came to this realization after a nightmare. During the 1840s, while he was turning his sewing-machine idea over in his head, he had a horrifying dream. He’d been kidnapped by savage natives who were planning to kill him. They’d harpoon him to death with their spears!

Spears with…holes in the spearheads…

When Howe woke up, he suddenly realised that a needle with a hole in its tip would feed the thread headfirst into the fabric, instead of having the thread trail into the fabric after the needle. This would make the whole process faster and neater. And it allowed him to create the lockstitch sewing machine.

The lockstitch is the basic sewing-machine stitch. It happens when the thread fed down from the needle intertwines (locks) with the thread fed to the fabric from the bobbin, underneath the machine. The result is a tight, unbreakable stitch formed from two lengths of thread…something that would have been impossible without Howe’s eye-point needle.

Howe’s luck didn’t last long, though.

The moment this new revelation went public, everyone started copying him! Howe had long and frustrating court-battles to protect his invention, and he did eventually win, forcing his competitors to pay him royalties everytime they built a machine that utilised his new needle. They couldn’t get around it because a machine needed his needle to work properly. So there was at least a certain level of happiness to the end of this story.

One of the men that Howe dragged, kicking and screaming to the courthouse was the son of a German millwright. A man named Isaac…Merritt…Singer.

Singer Sewing Machines

Every industry has one leader or one brand which is instantly identifiable.

Rolex makes watches. Mercedes makes cars. Harley Davidson makes motorcycles. Steinway makes pianos.

Singer makes sewing-machines.

Although, what the connection between sewing and pizza happens to be, I’m not quite sure…

For over 160 years, Singer has been considered the first name in quality sewing-machines. Ask your mother. Grandmother. Aunt. Most likely, they own, or know, or knew, someone who did own, or does own…a Singer. And it’s not a sewing-machine…it’s a Singer. ‘Sewing machine’ is a mean, base word, offensive to the ears. ‘Singer’ is a sign of quality, craftsmanship, durability and style.

So where did it start?

Singer, the name known the world-over for its top-quality sewing-machines, was established in 1851 by Isaac Merritt Singer, the guy who Elias Howe dragged to court for stealing his special needle.

With the aid of New York lawyer Edward Clark (1811-1882), the company was established as I.M. Singer & Co. In 1865, when the American Civil War ended, the company changed to the Singer Manufacturing Company. Most vintage Singers will have “SIMANCO” stamped onto their various components. It stands for the SInger MANufacturing COmpany. Now you know.

Singer machines were stupendously popular. In 1853, the company sold just 810 machines. By 1876, they had sold 262,316! And climbing!

Singer machines were popular because they were stylish, simple, well-built, easy to care for and solid as Gibraltar. Even today, Singer machines that are 60, 70, 90, 100, 120, 140 years old…still work perfectly…for the pure fact that no corners were cut and everything was machined to perfection.

Like a lot of companies, Singer stopped manufacturing its breadwinning products during the Second World War. Instead, they built military hardware. They tried manufacturing automatic pistols (five hundred all told), but the results were hardly spectacular, and five hundred were all that were ever made. Today, those five hundred Singer sidearms are pretty rare…and valuable!

Singers were made all over the world. Not just in America, but also in Russia and the United Kingdom, and exported to every corner of the globe.

Singers were popular because of their wide range, good designs and their easy operation and maintenance. They built everything from huge desktop treadle-powered, belt-driven machines that were as big as desks, and which could sit in a standard parlour or living-room in a middle-class residence, to small, portable, hand-cranked machines, like this one:

Something small like this could be carried onboard a ship and placed on a table. The hand-crank meant that there was no electricity required to run it. Just muscles – handy in parts of the world which didn’t have electrical grids. Hand-cranked Singers were made well into the 1930s, even as electrical models were starting to come out in the ’20s.

Singers were famous for their jet-black bodies with their fancy goldwork and patterns around the wheels, machine-beds, sides and tops, a distinctive style that lasted for over a hundred years.

Designed to be as portable and as self-sufficient as possible, Singers came with all kinds of nifty attachments and features, as did some other machine-makers of the day. Underneath the machine-bed was a storage-compartment. Here you could put extra thread, needles, chalk, spare keys and any other necessities that you needed. The machine-manual, attachments, accessories, repair-tools and equipment were also stored in these little hidden compartments. The famous curved ‘bentwood’ cases that covered the tops of most (but not all) Singers came with brackets and hooks inside them, to safely store things like knee-bars, cans of machine-oil and so-forth, to stop them rattling around and damaging the machine. It was expected that no matter where you were, you could operate, clean and repair your machine, no matter what happened.

The sewing machine has come a long way from the Georgian one-time experiment to the robber of tailor’s livelihoods, to becoming the cornerstone of the clothing industry. This is just a brief look at the history of a truly marvelous machine that made countless lives easier around the world.

Looking for more Information?

www.oldsingersewingmachines.com

www.sewalot.com

www.singer.com

Dedication

This posting is affectionately dedicated to my beloved, late and much-missed grandmother (7th May, 1914 – 28th Nov., 2011). A professional tailor and seamstress of nearly fifty years’ experience, she fixed all my clothes when I was a child. She passed away at the impressive age of 97. It was her machine which was the inspiration for this article.

My grandmother’s sewing-machine, a Singer model 99k, made in 1950, in Kilbowie, Scotland

22/03/2012 by scheong

All Aboard – The Kindertransports

You’re being chased out of town. There are riots in the streets. You’re not allowed to go to the cinema, the theatre, to public swimming-pools, restaurants or libraries. You can’t use public transport. Your movements are restricted by a nightly curfew. Every single day brings more challenges, more uncertainty, and even more danger.

But then you hear of this scheme, this program, this initiative. If you take part in it, in a few days’ time, you can escape all this unhappiness. You can be safe and happy and welcomed, in a land where nobody can hurt you. And you can leave right now.

But only you.

Your parents can’t come. Your grandparents have to stay behind. Your uncle and aunt won’t be there to see you leave.

You’re five…six…seven years old. You’re going to a country that you’ve probably never been to before. In all likelihood, you don’t even speak the language. Once in this new country, you cannot leave. You stay there for nearly ten years before you can return to a home that might not exist anymore, to find a family that has been wiped off the face of the earth.

This is the story of the Kindertransports.

What were the Kindertransports?

The Kindertransports was a refugee program established by the British Government in November, 1938. It was designed to evacuate persecuted Jewish children from Germany, Austria and Czechslovakia in the months leading up to the outbreak of World War Two, and to give them shelter and refuge in the relative safety of the British Isles. The program lasted from shortly after Kristallnacht in Germany, to shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in early September, 1939. About 10,000 Jewish German, Austrian and Czech boys and girls were evacuated from their homelands to England, to protect them from rising Nazi antisemitism on the European continent. It is one of the forgotten stories of the Second World War.

What was Kristallnacht?

“Kristallnacht”, a German phrase commonly translated into English as ‘The Night of Broken Glass’, was a nationwide pogrom (essentially a race-riot) of Germany’s Jewish population in November of 1938. In the space of a few hours, thousands of Jewish shops were smashed, burned and ransacked. Windows were broken, shops looted and over two hundred synagogues were burnt down. Many Jews were either shot or arrested and thrown in jail. More were tortured or sent to concentration-camps. It was the most extreme anti-Jewish measure taken by the German Nazi-Party before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The Effect of Kristallnacht

Jews had been fleeing from Germany ever since 1933. In 1935, various ‘Nuremberg Laws’ (a collection of anti-Jewish laws) made life increasingly more intolerable for Germany’s Jewish population. It was during this time that many forward-thinking Jews tried to escape from Germany. A few lucky thousand managed to get ships to England or the United States. Some went to the Dominican Republic. About 30,000 Jews fled to the International Settlement of Shanghai between 1933-1941.

But life for Jews who were stuck in Germany, and who weren’t able to escape, became more and more desperate and difficult with each passing day. Kristallnacht terrified the Jews and appalled the British Government. More than ever, letters pleading for the British Government to issue visas to Jews desperate to escape Germany, came flooding in.

The problem was that the British Government was unwilling to act. The year is 1938. The Depression is only just beginning to ease. The British Government did not want to allow Jews into the British Isles, who might steal jobs that were badly needed for British workers. Above all, the British Government did not see the situation in Germany as being one of refuge, but rather as one of immigration. To the eyes of the British Government, the German Jews wanted to come to Britain to work, not to escape the persecution of the Nazis. On top of this, fears of war with Germany have been growing for months now. British families are evacuating their own children to the countryside, or to towns and villages out of the expected operational radius of German fighter and bomber-planes. How could the government also take in thousands of German Jewish refugees? There wouldn’t be anywhere to house them! Orphanages, schools and foster-families were having enough issues coping with British children, let alone all these continental refugees!

But public pressure forced the government’s hand. In the end, a compromise was reached – Jewish children, unaccompanied by their parents, would be allowed passage from Germany to England. The British Government could be seen to be doing its part in trying to help Jews evacuate from Germany, but at the same time, British jobs wouldn’t be threatened since the refugees wouldn’t be old enough to work. It wouldn’t be easy, what with British children also being evacuated from all the big cities in southern England, but the government was determined to make some sort of effort.

How did the Kindertransports Work?

You are a Jewish child living in Germany in 1939. You want to be a part of these ‘Kindertransports’ that you’ve heard about. How do you join in?

Jewish children were rounded up. They were assembled in places like schools or orphanages, and then taken to the nearest train-station. Entire classes or orphanages of Jewish children, would be packed up and sent by train from Berlin, Vienna or Prague, to cities in Holland and Belgium (if you didn’t live in Berlin, Vienna or Prague, then you would have to travel there to get on the trains). Once in Holland or Belgium, you would be loaded onto a ship bound for England. Once the ship docked on the coast of England, you would be sent by train to cities or towns in southern England where you would be placed with a foster family, or housed in an orphanage. Perhaps, if you were exceptionally lucky, you might get to stay with relatives already living in England.

But once you reached England, there you had to stay. The outbreak of war meant that you wouldn’t be able to go back to Germany, or German-occupied Europe until May, 1945.

The British government was pressured by Jewish aid agencies, humanitarian groups and refugee advocates for weeks. It eventually set into motion a scheme for evacuating children from Europe.

How Long did the Transports Last?

The kindertransports lasted for approximately a year. The first transport docked in England on the 2nd of December, 1938. The ship left Europe and sailed for the coastal town of Harwich, carrying 196 German Jewish children, who had been evacuated from their orphanage in Berlin (which had been destroyed by the Nazis).

Some of the children in the first Kindertransport, photographed here in Holland, awaiting their ship to England. December 1st, 1938

Every child that was evacuated from Europe was given a bond of fifty pounds sterling, and was issued with a temporary travel permit or visa, that allowed him or her to leave Europe and travel to England. But this was only available to children who were below the age of 17. The expectation of the British government was that once the crisis and anti-Jewish fervor had died down, all the children would be sent back to Germany to be reunited with their families. If they’d know what would happen in just a few months, they might’ve tried even harder with their evacuation-plans…

In Europe, the kindertransports were handled by religious leaders and humanitarian workers who sent trainloads of children from schools and orphanages to the Belgian and Dutch coastlines where they could be sent to England. In groups of a thousand, or a few hundred each time, it’s estimated that about 10,000 children in total, were evacuated before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Life in England

You have escaped Germany. You reached Berlin, you got on a train, you arrived in Belgium and got safely across the English Channel to a British port.

Now what?

As I said earlier, most children were taken in by foster-families or private sponsers. If you were one of these children, then it meant a further train-ride from your port of arrival to the British capital, London, where you would be collected at the station, or at a designated collection-point, by your sponser or foster-family. Other children were taken in by local families living near the arrival port. Leftover children were kept in transit-camps until such a time when they could be sent to specially-prepared orphanages. About half the transported children were taken in by foster families or sponsers, while the rest ended up in boarding schools, orphanages, youth hostels or on farms as farmhands.

Monument to the Kindertransports, Liverpool Street Station, London, England

For most children, life was pretty good. They received gifts and they were mostly well-treated by their host-families, although of course, there were a few which weren’t. Most of the older children found work as farmhands, general labourers or as domestic servants. The oldest of the older children even signed up to join the British Army when they reached the age of 18, determined to fight the people who had driven them out of their homeland in the first place.

The Effect of War on the Kindertransports

The start of the Second World War effectively ended the Kindertransports. In England, a wave of anti-German feeling swept through the country. Thousands of Germans and Austrians were rounded up, arrested and thrown in prison. Among these were abut a thousand kindertransport refugees who looked old enough to be young adults. It was feared by the British Government that these “enemy aliens” might try and sabotage the British war-effort. To try and render them a negligable force, they were packed onto ships and sent to Canada and Australia.

The purpose of the internments was to seperate legitimate refugees of Nazism, from German and Austrian expatriates, who the British government saw as a threat. But in the chaos following the fall of France, everything got mixed up.

The most famous case was that of the HMT Dunera. HMT stands for “His Majesty’s Transport”; the Dunera was a military troopship. Crammed onto it were 2,542 prisoners, double the ship’s actual capacity. They included a smattering of German and Italian P.O.Ws, Nazi-sympathisers, and in one of the biggest blunders ever – about two thousand mostly German or Austrian Jewish refugees, including kindertransport children. The inclusion of the Jewish refugees on the prison-ship was a shameful disaster, one which Churchill himself called a deplorable and regrettable incident.

Where was the ship going?

It left Liverpool on the 10th of July, 1940. It sailed without incident, all the way to the other side of the world! It docked in Sydney, Australia, two months later. The desperately overcrowded ship (which was only supposed to hold 1,600 people) bcame notorious for the cramped, crowded and unsanitary conditions onboard. Australian customs and medical officials, who boarded the ship when it docked in Sydney, were appalled by the conditions in which two thousand Jewish refugees, and about 540 P.O.Ws, were forced to spend two months at sea in!

The Dunera docked in Port Melbourne, Australia, 1940

The prisoners onboard ship, including the Jewish refugees, were herded into prisoner-of-war camps in Australia. Eventually, letters sent to England by the refugees made the government realise that they’d made a horrific mistake! Changes were implemented and the Jews were automatically segregated from the German and Italian P.O.Ws and Nazi-sympathisers, and given their own camp. Here, they received medical treatment and whatever food and water the Australian government could spare. They were classified as “friendly aliens”, who posed no threat to the war-effort of the British Empire.

Of the Jewish refugees who somehow ended up in Australia on the Dunera, about a thousand of them stayed in Australia where they were offered permanent residency by the Australian government. Several hundred of the younger refugees enlisted in the Australian Army to fight the Japanese and the Germans. The remainder of the refugees booked passages back to England on the next available ship.

The Last Transports

The Kindertransports ended officially on the 1st of September, 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland. On this day, the borders were closed and trains were no-longer allowed to pass freely between the countries of Europe.

The Winton Trains

The Winton trains were a small number of trains that ran from Czechslovakia to safe ports in Western Europe, transporting Czech Jewish children to safety in England. They are named after Sir Nicholas Winton, the young British businessman who initiated the scheme. Sir Nicholas and his trains managed to save nearly 700 Jewish children from death.

The number would’ve been 950 children, but the start of the war ended Sir Nicholas’s humanitarian efforts. When war broke out in early September of 1939, the ninth (and final) Winton train was stopped at the Czech border. Nearly all the 250 Jewish children onboard were eventually killed.

In 2009, a commemorative “Winton Train” ran from Czechslovakia to England to commemorate Sir Nicholas’s efforts. Onboard the train were Jewish survivors who escaped the Holocaust on the original Winton trains back in 1939, and their descendants. The commemoration was also a celebration of Sir Nicholas’s 100th birthday! As of the time of this post, Sir Nicholas is 102 years old.

The very last Kindertransport left Europe on the 14th of May, 1940. It was the steamship Bodegraven, which left the Dutch port city of Ijmuiden (“Ei-mouden”) during the fall of Holland. It carried eighty incredibly lucky children to safety in England.

Of the 10,000 Jewish children and teenagers who escaped the Nazis during the Holocaust thanks to the kindertransports, nearly none of them ever saw their parents ever again.

More Information?

The Kindertransport Association

“The Kindertransports: A Childhood in Hamburg”, by Paul M. Cohn, a Kindertransport survivor.

18/03/2012 by scheong

Darwin Awards: Charles Darwin and the History of Evolutionary Theory

To thousands of people, the Darwin Awards are a series of hilarious but tragic true stories that circulate the internet every few months and which each year, are updated with newer and even more hilariously sad award-winners who have done mankind the dubious honour of stepping up to receive this coveted, time-honoured and completely senseless imaginary prize.

For those who don’t know, the ‘Darwin Awards’ are fictional awards that should be given out each year to the people who, in the award’s own words: “remove themselves from the human gene-pool” either by rendering themselves sterile or by killing themselves in an increasingly stupid and hilarious range of ways.

Legendary Darwin Awards include the man who tried to check for the presence of petrol with a lit match, the bomb-disposal expert who tried to dispose of nitroglycerine by patting it down with a shovel and the youth who attempted to play ‘Russian Roulette’ with an automatic pistol.

The awards pay ‘tribute’, so to speak, to the legendary naturalist Charles Robert Darwin and his famous Theory of Evolution. The theory states that every species on earth improves with each generation by killing off the elements of that species which are detrimental to its progress…or in layman’s terms: ‘Survival of the Fittest’. The winners of the Darwin Awards have therefore done mankind a favour by removing themselves from humanity and in the long-run, contributed towards the betterment of mankind.

In the 21st Century, this is all that most people think about when they hear the name ‘Darwin’. Little thought is probably given these days, to the theorist and scientist who came up with this radical, revolutionary and groundshaking idea that has shaped modern biological science for the past 150+ years. So what is the Theory of Evolution? How did Darwin come up with the Theory and what happened when he did?

What is the Theory of Evolution?

There are a lot of mistaken beliefs about the Theory of Evolution, warped and twisted over time by those who attempt to give it credence and by those who would destroy it as heresy. So what exactly is it?

– The Darwinian Theory of Evolution is not an attempt to explain the creation of the world.

– The Darwinian Theory of Evolution is not an attempt to show how life came into being.

– The Darwinian Theory of Evolution is not an attempt to explain ‘where we come from’.

– The Darwinian Theory of Evolution is not an attempt to explain ‘where we go to’.

– The Darwinian Theory of Evolution is not an attempt to explain the creation of the known universe.

So if that’s what you’ve been told…forget it immediately.

The Darwinian Theory of Evolution attempts to explain none of these things. It was created to attempt to explain how and why a species changes over time and how animals of all kinds (including humans) can change through natural selection to better adapt to their surroundings. Nothing more. Nothing less. The story of how Darwin came up with this theory was revolutionary and mindboggling to medical, scientific and religious minds of the mid-1800s. Although his theory was fascinating and interesting, it was also wildly controversial…nearly 200 years after it was first published, it doesn’t seem like much has changed.

Who was Charles Darwin?

Charles Darwin was an English naturalist, born in Shropshire, England in 1809, into the wealthy and prominent Darwin-Wedgewood Family. His maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgewood…Yes, the same Wedgewood who established the famous pottery firm. Darwin developed an interest in medicine and science from a young age. He was particularly interested in plants and animals, and fancied himself as something of a gardener.

Charles’s father was the physician Dr. Robert Waring Darwin, and as a man of science, was delighted at his son’s field of interests and encouraged him with his gardening and scientific research. Charles also helped his father in his medical research and attending to his patients.

As a student, Charles’s scientific interests were shared by his older brother, Erasmus Darwin. The two brothers set up a scientific laboratory in a garden shed in their house and Charles became his brother’s lab-assistant in their numerous experiements. It was this upbringing, surrounded by medicine, science, biology, a burning curiosity and a fascination for plants and animals, that would spur on Darwin to, in his later years, develop his famous evolutionary theory.

The World Before Darwin

Even today in the 21st Century, there are still people who believe firmly in the Theory of Creationism. This theory states that God created everything and that the Story of Creation as told in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, is to be taken as literal and true fact.

As it was in the 1800s, nearly two centuries ago.

Prior to Darwin’s development of the Evolutionary Theory, how did people explain the history of the natural world?

Taking the bible as a guide, scientists believed that the world was only a few thousand or tens of thousands of years old. They believed that everything was a divine creation from God above. And this would’ve been fine…except for one problem.

People kept finding fossils.

Fossil-hunting was just as popular in Victorian times as it is today. And whenever scientists were confronted with these, they had no idea how to explain it. It went against everything that religion had told them about the history of the world, and in the 1800s, religion was the bedrock of society. To question the Church, to question God, on anything, was strictly taboo. It simply wasn’t done!

…but the fossils were there. And they were an annoying little thorn in the side of the scientific and religious communities that wouldn’t go away. So how did they explain them?

The closest thing to the Evolutionary Theory that existed before it, was the belief in naturalism. In a nutshell, naturalism is the understanding that there are specific Laws of Nature. These laws regulated how and why certain things happened in the natural universe. The one that we see every day. Anything outside this order would not and did not affect the natural world, and had no bearing or significance to life on earth whatsoever, these elements being called ‘Supernatural’. Since God did not exist in nature and since nothing that didn’t exist in nature was thought to have a bearing on the operation and maintenance of the planet, God was seen as insignificant and imaginary. His presence or absence from the lives of everyday people was something of no consequence. As he wasn’t of the natural world, he couldn’t affect it or regulate it in any way.

In the earlier 1800s, naturalism was the only theory apart from Creationism, that had any followers. But Victorian conservatism forced naturalism underground. It went against the teachings and belief of the Church of England, and was quashed and discredited to the fullest extent possible.

…And we still have those pesky fossils.

Without naturalism to back up any theories, scientists of the early 1800s believed that fossils existed due to the theory of catastrophism.

The Theory of Catastrophism is exactly what it sounds like. According to this theory, scientists believed that every few thousand years, God caused great natural disasters. Tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, raging infernos and great storms. These powerful, earthshaking, earth-changing, cataclysmic events or ‘catastrophes’ (giving the theory its name) was God’s way of wiping out everything that had existed before, and starting fresh with a new world every few thousand years. Fossils, argued catastrophism scientists, were merely the remants that God left behind of the stricken worlds that he had obliterated after each catastrophic event.

Once a catastrophic event had taken place and the earth was wiped clean, God would recreate the earth and its creatures out of nothing but thin air (because he’s like…God and can do…anything), set it up and then just sit back and watch, to see if his latest version of Earth would work out as he planned.

An awesome theory. But there were still people in the scientific community to whom this theory did not jive. To them, it did not explain the history of the world in a coherent and realistic manner that explained everything that they saw around them, or everything that they found on archeological digs. Amongst these naysayers of the Theory of Catastrophism, was Charles Darwin.

The Call of the Sea

In 1831, a young sea-captain was stocking his little ship for a voyage around the world. A voyage of scientific research, a voyage of adventure, a voyage of discovery!

This captain was Robert FitzRoy.

FitzRoy was a sea-captain, a navy man, and one of the first successful meteorologists, who made accurate weather-forecasting a reality. He helped design better and more accurate barometers to forecast the weather with greater accuracy (a barometer works by measuring atmospheric pressure, the same kind of ‘high pressure’ and ‘low pressure’ that your local weatherman talks about on the 6 o’clock news every evening, thereby allowing people to foretell the weather).

FitzRoy was looking for a naturalist – a scientist of the natural world – to follow him on his voyage and to be his travelling companion. He chose the young (22-year-old) Charles Darwin to be that naturalist.

The voyage was the chance of a lifetime for Darwin. A very long chance. The voyage took nearly five years! In that time, he and FitzRoy would literally sail around the world, leaving England in December of 1831 and heading west. They would sail down through the Atlantic, around the bottom of South America, across the Pacific, stop off at New Zealand and Australia, then sail all the way across the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, around Africa, up the continent’s west coast and then back to England, in October of 1836.

The actual purpose of the voyage was to chart the world, to make corrections on earlier, less accurate maps, and to test out the new maritime chronometers. The maritime chronometer, the insanely accurate ship’s clock invented by clockmaker John Harrison at the turn of the century, was a relatively new invention in the 1830s. Although they were now relatively cheap enough that any ship with a wealthy-enough captain could purchase one, they still required rigorous in-the-field testing. When FitzRoy set sail in 1831, he carried twenty two of these clocks onboard his ship!

This maritime chronometer, housed in the British Museum, was one of nearly two dozen carried on FitzRoy’s ship during its 1831-36 voyage

And the name of this ship?

The H.M.S. Beagle. That’s the Beagle there, in the middle of this painting from 1841.

A Voyage of Discovery

The H.M.S. Beagle left England on the 27th of December, 1831. It initially sailed south to the Canary Islands, and then southwest towards South America. Regular stops allowed Darwin to get off the ship and to explore the South-American wilderness, where he examined plants, animals, bones and fossils. He would even arrange with Capt. FitzRoy, to have himself dropped off at one point along the coastline, while the ship sailed on without him. They would meet up further along the coastline at a pre-determined time and place, where Darwin would reboard the ship for the next leg of their voyage.

The Beagle reached the famous Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean in September of 1835. Here, Darwin collected more specimens and wrote about his observations on the islands, such as the famous giant tortoises…He even tried to ride one!…but the tortoise failed to oblige him and retreated inside its shell.

It was while he was on the Galapagos Islands, that the seeds for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution were gathered. As he journeyed between the islands, examining the local wildlife, he noticed how the birds which existed on each island, although were all of the same species (they were all mockingbirds), no two types of mockingbirds were exactly the same. Each island had its own distinct type of bird. From this observation, Darwin concluded that the birds had to have a common ancestor – They had to, because they were all the same species of bird! This ancestor arrived in the Galapagos sometime in the distant past, and over several hundred years, its descendants adapted and morphed to make the best use of their local environments.

In January of 1836, the Beagle reached Australia. It dropped anchor in Sydney, a young city, then not yet fifty years old.

The ship then sailed across the Indian Ocean towards South America…again. Here, it turned northwards and it reached England on the 2nd of October, 1836.

The voyage had taken nearly five years, and Darwin had ammassed a library of observations, diary-entries, sketches, scientific specimens and stuffed animals. Before the end of the decade, he would publish his account of his journey on the Beagle and was in the process of writing an account of the flora and fauna that he had encountered on his voyage (finally published in 1843).

On the Origin of Origins

Charles Darwin did not develop his evolutionary theory on the voyage of the Beagle. He’d already been thinking about it before he left England. What the voyage allowed him to do was to carry out extra research and collect data to back up his theories on evolution.

Almost the minute he got off the Beagle when it docked in England, Darwin started thinking about his theory of evolution. His observations on creatures such as the mockingbirds of the Galapagos Islands had convinced him that he was onto something. He theorised that the birds got the way they did through evolution or ‘transmutation’. Transmutation being the belief that species mutate or change over time, to adapt to their environments, and that this was a process that took several successive generations, each one growing bigger, or better, or stronger, or more adept than the one that preceded it.

Sound familiar?

In 1838, Darwin read “An Essay on the Principle of Population“. It was written by the late (1766-1834) Reverend Thomas Malthus. Malthus was fascinated by populations, demographics and people, and he made the study of population and demography his hobby. In ‘The Principle of Population‘, Malthus observed that no population grows forever. Sooner or later, something happens that checks or culls the population. Famine. Fire. The Black Death in the 1340s. On the subject of sustaining and maintaining a population, Mr. Malthus wrote:

“Must it not then be acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories of mankind, that in every age and in every State in which man has existed, or does now exist, that the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence, that population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and, that the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.”

– Rev. Thomas R. Malthus, ‘The Principle of Population’, Chapt. 7.

19th-century writing is hideously convoluted, so what does that all mean? The reverend is saying that in every age and state of human existence, the ability of a population to grow is directly influenced by its means of subsistence – the things needed to survive – food, water, clothing, heat, discount-DVDs etc. If the necessities for survival increase, then the population that depends on them will also increase. But, if a population outgrows its means of subsistence, then it will end up decreasing in size (due to starvation, death, disease and vice), until such time that the population has returned to a level where the available resources can support it comfortably once more.

Darwin must have read this passage when he read the full text of Malthus’s essay in 1838. And it made him think of what is now one of the cornerstones of the Evolutionary Theory.

Figured it out yet?

The Survival of the Fittest.

Darwin’s observations during his voyage on the Beagle, and his research and brainstorming, caused him to suppose that a contributing factor to evolution was the supposition that only the strongest of any species survives when some great event happens, that threatens their existence. These survivors, these fighters, pass on these traits that allowed them to live, to their children, which make them even stronger, and so-on and so-forth, down the generations.

Linked to the ‘Survival of the Fittest’ idea, Darwin came up with another brainwave in 1840. He called it ‘Natural selection’. He possibly linked this to the older theories of naturalism (mentioned earlier), which stated that there were laws in nature that regulated how the earth worked. Surely, these laws regulated not only the plants and air and sky and water, the sun and the moon, but surely…the animals as well! These laws stated that nature selects which animals survive in which environments due to natural traits with which they are born…natural selection…and that the survival of the fittest determined which of these selected, came out on top as the dominant species or creature in a particular part of the world. As they say – Many are called, but few are chosen.

“On the Origin of Species”

Throughout the 1840s and 50s, Charles Darwin worked on his groundbreaking new book on science and the origins of different species of animals. And he took his time about it, too. Nearly twenty years! Wondering when the hell this long-fabled book of his was ever going to come out of the press and onto bookshop shelves, Darwin’s colleague, biologist Alfred Russel Wallace (who was also exploring evolutionary science), sent Darwin a package in June, 1858, to show Darwin that he wasn’t the only scientist out there who was stumbling around and thinking about evolution. The actual package turned out to be a book that Wallace had just recently published on the subject of evolution. Most likely, Wallace sent Darwin a copy of his essay entitled “On the Natural History of the Aru Islands”, which would’ve been his latest published work; it came out in 1857.

This little nudge encouraged Darwin to press on with his book. In 1859, he published:

“On the Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection,
or the Preservation of Favoured Races
in the Struggle for Life”

Now that is one hell of a long title. Fortunately for us, it was shortened to “On the Origin of Species” later on, and by the sixth edition, just “The Origin of Species”.

The ‘Origin’ was a bombshell of a book. It went against everything that science and religion had believed up to that point, and it was the culmination of years of research by Darwin and other emerging evolutionary scientists, all in one package.

‘Origin’ was both a popular and fascinating book, and also a hated book, and was received much better in some countries than in others. In the German states (actual ‘Germany’ as a country did not exist until 1871) of the Prussian Empire, the book was well-received, as well as in the United States and other countries around the world.

For all its popularity, the book also garnered plenty of controversy. The idea that humans were descendant from lower, earlier, more primative life-forms, just like all other animals, as the book suggested, flew right in the face of the Church. After all, God created humans in his OWN image. Not in the image of monkeys and chimps and apes! Darwin’s theories regarding the biological history of humanity were a prickly subject where religion was concerned…150 years later…and it still is.

Darwin after ‘Species’

Darwin followed the consumption of his book by the world’s reading public with great interest. He read letters sent to him, he received telegrams, he read book-reviews, newpspaper-articles and engaged in scholarly debates with colleagues and friends. The outcry over the publication of ‘Species’ was not as great as Darwin had feared, but there were still those who grumbled about it. Some in religious circles dismissed it completely, while others saw evolution as proof of God’s great powers and his abilities to change animals to make them more at home in their environments.

Some people argued that miracles performed by God held no place on earth (linking back to the theory of naturalism again – what doesn’t happen on earth, doesn’t affect earth) and that such miracles would completely go against the natural workings of the world as were understood in the 1850s and 60s. Darwin’s new book, it was claimed, explained the history of the world in a comprehensive and understandable way, that made the best use of all the archeological and biological evidence then available. Perhaps predictably, it was the younger set of scientists and biologists who were more receptive to Darwin’s ideas, and the movement of evolutionary biology was called ‘Darwinism’ in his honour.

By the end of the 1800s, evolutionary explanations and theories had gained a foothold of acceptance in the Victorian scientific community. In 1871, Darwin published his next great work, “The Descent of Man”, in which he discussed his theories of human evolution. Apart from ‘Species’, this was his other great work. Despite increasingly frequent bouts of increasingly bad health, Darwin kept writing and publishing scientific and biological papers and books throughout his life.

The End of Darwin

Charles Darwin died on the 19th of April, 1882. He was seventy-three years old. His last words were to his wife, Emma Wedgewood-Darwin, and to two of his children, Henrietta and Francis Darwin. After petitioning by his friends and colleagues, Darwin was given the honour of a burial at Westminster Abbey in London.

Charles’s older brother, Erasmus, who had fuelled Charles’s early interests in science and biology, died a year earlier in 1881. He remained close and friendly to his younger brother throughout their lives, and Charles’s SEVEN children (originally ten, but three died young) fondly called him “Uncle Ras”. Erasmus was a confirmed bachelor and never married. He could be a rather quiet, sullen, grumpy person when he was alone, but was a bit of a party-animal when he was with friends and family. He received his brother’s book, ‘On the Origin of Species’ with enthusiasm and praised it highly, calling it the best thing he’d ever read. When Erasmus died, it was Charles’s wife, Emma, who broke the news of his brother’s death. Charles confessed joy at this development. He knew that Erasmus had been in poor and rapidly declining health for several years, and was glad that his suffering had finally ended.

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