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Gibraltar of the East: The Fall of Singapore

The Second World War has several famous battles and engagements. In the early years of the war, the Axis was beating back the Allies and gaining ground at a rapid pace. One by one, Allied countries fell to the Germans and the Japanese. China. Hong Kong. Poland. France. Denmark. Greece and The Netherlands. The Axis seemed unstoppable. Between 1939 and 1942, Europe and Asia were choked by the oppression of German and Japanese military might which was determined to strangle them to death.

The British were confident, however, that they could fight off their aggressors and keep them at bay. The might of the British Empire would keep the Nazis and the Japanese at bay and would hold them off alone until reinforcements eventually arrived from America. That was what they would do and that was what they were sure they could do! But for all their planning and scheming and thoughts of colonial and imperial strength and power, the British armed forces suffered blow after blow at the hands of the Japanese, who conquered Hong Kong and the Malay Peninsula. The biggest blow to British morale and to the ego of British military leaders, however, was the loss of what they saw as their greatest and most powerful, their impregnable and indestructable fortress…The island of Singapore.

The fall of Singapore is something that, when you think about it, should never have happened. It’s something that you think would never have happened. But the British army, airforce and navy, unprepared for the Japanese plan of attack, did not provide contigency plans for what might happen if their first lines of defence were breeched, or indeed, if they were bypassed altogether. With the fall of Singapore came the biggest British military disaster since the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Singapore in the 1930s

Singapore is a tiny island nation off the southern coast of the Malay peninsula, seperated from it by the Strait of Johor. Modern Singapore was established in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles, a British statesman who saw Singapore as a wonderful place to establish a British colony and trading-port. Over the next one hundred years, Singapore grew and prospered. Its position in the middle of the Southeast Pacific made it a convenient port for ships to stop at during long voyages between Europe and Asia. The island flourished thanks to international trade and by the early 20th century, boasted a large population of immigrant Chinese and a significant number of British expatriates. Due to its status as a free trading port where almost anything was loaded, offloaded, traded, bought and sold, Singapore became known as the ‘Crossroads of the Orient’; the port city where ships from all over the world could dock.


Singapore’s Chinatown as it appeared in the 1930s

In the 1930s, Japan was on the march. Starting in 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War between the Chinese and the Japanese threatened to sweep across Asia and crush everything. The Chinese were already weakened from political in-fighting between the Communists and the Capitalists and in its weakened state, China was steamrollered by the Japanese. The British, who had built up Singapore as a prosperous trading-post and naval base, were fearful of a Japanese invasion. Singapore had to be protected. In the years leading up to the Second World War and during the opening years of that conflict, Singapore and the Malay Peninsula were bolstered with more troops and better defences. The British thought that it would be easy to defend Malaya and Singapore because the British would outsmart their enemy. And if the Japanese came by sea, the batteries of coastal-defence cannons would blast their ships out of the sea.

British Defences

The British Empire would defend its prized colony of Singapore down to the last man. To do this, it would build up Singapore as an impregnable fortress, which gave the island the nickname the ‘Gibraltar of the East’. To defend Singapore, the Royal Navy sent two warships: The Prince of Wales and the Repulse, to guard the island and to be the Royal Navy’s first-response team to any enemy naval activity in the area. The Prince of Wales was up-to-date and modern: Built in 1939, it was brand-new, the perfect naval-response weapon to fight off the Japanese. The Repulse on the other hand, left something to be desired. A relic of the Great War of 1914, it was already over twenty years old by the time it was sent to Singapore. If the Prince of Wales was put out of action, the Repulse would become an easy target. Apart from naval preparations, Singapore and the Malay Peninsula would also be defended by the British Army and Empire troops from Australia, New Zealand and India. By 1941-1942, the British and Empire forces numbered 85,000 strong, facing off against just 35,000 Japanese, more than enough to stop the slow-moving land-based Japanese. And if they came by sea, the might of the British Navy would blast the stinking Nips right out of the water!…Or at least, that was the plan.

British Malaya; 1941

“…Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam, Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Phillipine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island and this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area…”

– Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt; radio address, December 8th, 1941

1941; a year which will live in infamy. Between December 7th and December 8th of that year, the Japanese Empire launched a surprise offensive against many countries in the South Pacific region. It wasn’t just the American naval base at Pearl Harbor that was hit, but many other places in the same region, including British holdings in Hong Kong and the Malay Peninsula. Hong Kong’s defensive forces, severely outnumbered by the Japanese, surrendered in a little over three and a half weeks after the Japanese launched their assault, surrendering to them on the 25th of December…Christmas Day, 1941. Some Christmas.

In Malaya, the fighting lasted much longer. The Japanese were very interested in Malaya; it had a lot of natural resources that they wanted, like tin mines and rubber-plantations. At the time, a significant portion of the world’s rubber came from Malaya, and the Japanese wanted in. The fighting was fierce, with British, Indian and Australian troops on one side, and the forces of the Imperial Japanese Army on the other. Despite everything, the Japanese were steamrolling the Empire forces further and further back, further and further south. It seemed like every week, a town or city on the Peninsula would fall to the Japanese.

On the 8th of December, the Japanese landed on the west coast of Malaya. On the 11th of December, the city of Jitra fell. Then the garrison at Penang, which fell on the 17th of December. A few weeks later, the Malayan capital of Kuala Lumpur also fell, on the 11th of January, 1942. The Japanese were surging south and the British could do nothing to stop them.

The Japanese Sweep

How was it that the Japanese, supposedly backward, slanty-eyed, yellow, cowardly, second-class people, which the British certainly saw them as, could defeat the might, power and imperial strength and know-how of the invincible British Empire? Even in Singapore, when British forces were more than double the strength of the Japanese?

The key to the British defeat in Malaya and Singapore lay in close-mindedness, a lack of foresight and I suppose to a small extent, a belief in racial intellectual superiority. The British believed that the Japanese would invade Singapore by sea. They were so convinced of this that they even set up coastal defences and cannons to blast the Japanese Navy out of the water. The idea of the Japanese invading by land from the north was absolutely preposterous. To begin with, they’d have to get through all those jungles and dirt tracks and the rain and the flooding…impossible with trucks and heavily-loaded tanks. Although the British did concede that defence of the Peninsula should be taken into account, the defences set up were inadequate to deal with the rapid movements of the Japanese…who invaded on bicycles.

That’s right.

Bicycles.

Like the one you ride around the park.

The Japanese mobilised their troops on bicycles. Light, fast and easy to carry, bicycles could move quickly through the jungles and over flooded roads and could go places that larger, motorised vehicles could not. They exchanged their heavier tanks for lighter and more mobile tanks that could move faster and not get bogged down in the mud. The speed at which the Japanese could move meant that the British couldn’t hold their defences and despite dynamiting every bridge, road and crossing-point across every river, gorge and valley that they could find, they were unable to slow down the Japanese advance significantly enough to set up a proper defence and hold off their attackers.

The Invasion of Singapore; 1942

By early 1942, Singapore was in deep trouble. Hong Kong had fallen just a few days before and the British lines were breaking over and over again as the Japanese came charging southwards. The city of Singapore was being bombed extensively by the Japanese Air Force and the island did not have enough airplanes or anti-aircraft guns to fight off or even engage in an air-battle. Terrified civilians were being evacuated from the Port of Singapore by merchant-ships and military vessels which had been ordered to pull out. British and Empire forces set up defensive positions on the northwest side of the island where the Strait of Johor was narrowest – the likeliest spot for the Japanese amphibious landing on the island. Military engineers had destroyed the causeway bridge between Singapore and Malaya, which would delay the Japanese, but only for a little over a week. Once the Japanese got a toehold on Singaporean soil, they were unstoppable. The Japanese found weak spots in British defences and exploited them. At the same time, British offensives failed time and time again. The Japanese invaded Singapore on the 8th of February, 1942. In six days, they had pushed the British back until they controlled less than half the island.

On the 14th of February, Japanese forces committed one of their worst attacks against civilians, since the Rape of Nanjing, in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women and children were murdered and raped by Japanese soldiers invading the Chinese city of Nanjing in December of 1937. It was on this day, the 14th of February, that the Japanese reached one of Singapore’s main medical institutions: Alexandra Hospital. Built in 1938, the hospital was one of the most advanced medical institutions in Southeast Asia at the time.


British Military Hospital, Alexandra Hospital, Singapore; 1938

The Japanese soldiers stormed the hospital that afternoon, bayonetting doctors, nurses, patients and orderlies. Anyone not bayonetted was rounded up and locked up. They were then taken out into the hospital grounds and bayonetted or decapitated. Anyone left was sent to Changi Prison. The commanding officer of Japanese forces in Singapore, General Yamashita, was appalled and infuriated by the attack on non-combatant, unarmed and surrendering medical staff and civilian and military patients at the hospital. He had as many of the soldiers responsible as could be found executed for the crime and personally apologised to surviving staff and patients.

While Hong Kong held out for nearly one month, Singapore fell in a week. Japanese forces landed in Singapore on the 8th of February and forced Australian and British troops further and further back until on the 15th of February, the Allies were defending a tiny area in the southern part of Singapore where the Civic District is today. Just a few miles behind the Allied lines was the mouth of the Singapore River and the Pacific Ocean.


The Fullerton Building at the mouth of the Singapore River. The British signed their surrender here to the Japanese in 1942 and the structure remained the Japanese HQ in Singapore throughout their occupation. Today, the same building is the Fullerton Hotel

Singapore was now being shelled relentlessly by Japanese artillery and bombed by the Japanese Air Force. Water and fuel supplies were almost non-existent; ammunition, weapons and other military hardware was either destroyed or in short supply. On the evening of the 15th of February, 1942, the British forces surrendered to the Japanese. It was, and remains, the largest surrender of British military forces in history.

The Occupation of Singapore; 1942-1945


Japanese soldiers marching through Fullerton Square in southern Singapore

For the next three and a half years, Singapore was under Japanese occupation. Basic foodstuffs and daily necessities such as rice, vegetables, meat, water and clothing became extremely rare and people struggled to make ends meet. The shelling of Singapore had damaged and destroyed buildings, knocked out powerlines and ruptured water-mains. The chronic shortages of food led many people to grow their own vegetables and fruits to survive. The Japanese continued to attack Singapore’s Chinese population, rounding men up and shooting them in the jungles.

During the occupation, the British, knowing that they could not yet hope to retake Singapore, did carry out espionage and sabotage missions against the Japanese in Singapore. Operations carried out against the Japanese included Operation Jaywick, in which a small group of Australian soldiers infiltrated the Port of Singapore. They successfully destroyed seven Japanese ships without losing any of their own men. In August 1945, the British launched another attack against the Japanese, sneaking into Singapore Harbour with midget submarines. They mined a Japanese warship, hoping to sink it. Although the mines detonated successfully and the midget submarines made successful escapes from Singapore, the target ship, the cruiser Takao, was not damaged enough for it to sink (it was eventually destroyed in 1946 as a target-ship during naval exercises).

The Allies continued to attack Singapore throughout the occupation, sometimes in more open ways than others. While the British and Empire armed forces limited their activities to sabotage and spying, the Americans attacked Singapore from the air. Between November 1944 and May 1945, the RAF and the USAAF carried out eleven air-raids on Singapore, attacking fuel-dumps, naval facilities and docks around Singapore that were essential to the Japanese war effort. Mines were also laid around Singapore to disrupt Japanese naval movements in the area.

The Liberation of Singapore; September, 1945

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in May of 1945, the Allies turned their attention fully towards Japan. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan and the Americans were planning to invade the Japanese mainland (this plan was later scrapped in favour of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). After the dropping of the bombs in August, 1945, the British made plans to recapture Singapore. They sailed for Malaya and successfully captured Penang. With their presence in Malaya established, they made for the island nation of Singapore on the 2nd of September. Although reluctant and wanting to fight to the death, the Japanese eventually surrendered peacefully when the British landed in Singapore on the 4th of September. The commanding officer of the Japanese forces in Singapore, General Seishiro Itagaki signed the terms for British reoccupation of Singapore when the cruiser HMS Sussex docked off the coast of Singapore. Eight days later, the Instrument of Surrender was signed at the Municipal Building (today Singapore’s City Hall) on the 12th of September.


City Hall, Singapore

Unable to cope with the humiliation of defeat, when General Itagaki told his officers of their surrender to the British, up to three hundred of them committed suicide using grenades, in their rooms at Singapore’s famous Raffles Hotel (which had been used as a base by the Japanese during the occupation).


Raffles Hotel, Singapore, in the 1930s. Japanese army officers committed mass suicide here in 1945 after their surrender to the British

With the successful ousting of the Japanese, even if it was three and a half years too late, the returning British forces were given a hero’s welcome by Singaporean civilians. In February, 1942, the Japanese had ordered the British to march through Singapore carrying a Union Jack flag and a white flag of surrender as a final humiliation after having lost their colonial stronghold to a superior military force. The Japanese had been told that no Union Jack flags existed on the whole of Singapore, as they had all been burned prior to the Japanese invasion, a statement that was probably a lie. A British officer held captive in Singapore’s Changi Prison retained his personal Union Jack flag and kept it hidden from the Japanese. The flag was used in the prison during the funerals of British and Empire soldiers who died as a result of Japanese brutality. When Singapore was liberated, this flag was handed to Lord Louis Mountbatten, who signed the British acceptance of the Japanese surrender, and who raised this flag over the island to signal the return of peace and stability to Singapore. A newsreel of the liberation of Singapore and the raising of the Union Jack may be viewed here.


September, 1945. Singaporeans hold a parade to celebrate the end of the Japanese occupation and the return of British forces

 
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Heads Will Roll: The Hangman & Headsman’s Trades

You read about it in crime-novels. You see it in movies or in historical dramas. You maybe even play-acted it in school or on the stage somewhere in a theatrical production of some kind. For centuries, hanging and decapitation have been the two main methods of capital punishment.

But have you ever wondered how it was done? Despite the old saying that “everybody dies easy”, it’s not something that might be said by the men who have the unique and rather unenviable task of actually doing it for a living. The headsman and the hangman, the two men who traditionally carried out these two most common methods of civil execution, actually had to approach each execution from a highly scientific point of view.

Execution by Beheading

Beheading someone as a form of execution is not easy to do. In ancient times, it was done with swords or axes. These weapons, though sharp, did not always do the job very well. The human neck is surprisingly strong and considerable force is required to break it. In medieval times, specially-crafted execution-axes were used, that look similar to the one pictured here:

Axes such as this did not so much ‘cut’ the head off as they simply bashed their way through the neck-bone. They were crude at the best of times and useless at the worst of times. Most medieval executioners also carried a dagger with them called a ‘slitting knife’, with which they would have to literally slice the head off, using the slitting-knife to cut away the remaining muscles and flesh so that the head would fall off the corpse and land in the basket below…all the while, the severed neck would be pumping out blood onto the scaffolding.

During the 1700s, reformers were looking for a more effective way to decapitate people. Axes and swords were inefficient. They did not always work and death was neither swift nor painless. In the early 1790s, the French came up with the answer. The Guillotine.

Named for Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a French physician, the guillotine was first put to use in 1792. It remained the only legal method of execution in France for the next 189 years (capital punishment in France was abolished in 1981). It was designed to take the human error out of the equation of death by beheading. The angled blade of the guillotine was developed so that the head would be severed cleanly from the body in one swift, sweeping stroke, instead of being hacked off like with an axe.

So much for the guillotine. That was the easy part.

Execution by Hanging

Ah. Execution by Hanging. The favoured method in Asia and in most of the Western countries where capital punishment was (or still is) legal. Anyone can chop a man’s head off. Raise the guillotine, slot him in the hole and let go of the rope…done! But how many people can hang a man? Believe me, it’s not that easy.

The job of hangman is very unique. Not because he’s an executioner. Not because he might be depised by society (I’m sure lawyers are also despised by society), but because there’s a lot more to this job than meets the eye. Not just anybody can hang anybody, not just because of the emotional toll, but simply because not just anybody can hang any body. You see, the thing that makes the job of hangman difficult is that there is a high level of mathematical skill required in this job. You may not see it, or even believe it, but it is true and it is there.

In older times, you hanged a man thus:

You threw the rope over a tree or a hanging-post, got the condemmed man to stand on a chair, then you slipped the noose around his neck, hopped down, kicked the chair away and let him dangle around for five…ten…fifteen…twenty…thirty minutes…however long it took, until he eventually strangled to death. Yes. It could take that long.

This was unacceptable. It was unsightly and it took far too long; another way of hanging the condemned was required. The old method of hanging was called the ‘short-drop’ method. String him up, kick the bucket away and then let him choke to death after a short drop. This by the way, is where we get the phrase ‘kick the bucket’ (meaning to commit suicide). It comes from when the suicider, after looping the noose around his neck, kicks away the upturned bucket that he was standing on.


Almost synonymous with the ‘Short Drop’ hanging method is the Tyburn Tree in Tyburn, London, a famous, triangle-shaped gallows on which up to two dozen people could be executed at one time. The Tree was erected in 1571 and wasn’t taken down until 1783! A plaque stands where the Tree was once located

The new method of hanging was very different from the old, even though on the surface they look the same. And it was this new method, called the ‘long-drop’ method, that was so scientific. And this is why not anybody can hang anybody, or any body, if you get my drift.

Hanging a body using the ‘Long Drop’ method is a tricky process. In the short-drop method, the aim is to strangle the condemned until they die from suffocation. The long-drop method aims to break the victim’s neck, providing swift and painless death, specifically, to break the neck at the C2 vertebra; the second vertebrae down from the head. Achieving this is difficult because no two persons are exactly alike. Some weigh more than others. Some weigh less. Some are taller than others, some are shorter. Some might have thin, scrawny necks. Some have thick, bulldog ones. How on earth are you going to figure out how much rope to use and how long a drop you need to break a given person’s neck? Because if you don’t have the right amount of rope, things can go horribly wrong.

See? It’s not so easy now, is it?

The long-drop method was developed by an English hangman named William Marwood in 1872. In time, a table was drawn up that took all the complexity out of how to carry out a good hanging. It was called Marwood’s Table of Drops. Published in 1888, the Official Table of Drops may be found about three-quarters the way down the page provided in this link. So, how did a long-drop hanging take place?

As I’ve explained, hanging changed over time. By the late 19th century, it was a pretty scientific undertaking that required care and deliberation. A typical long-drop hanging is done in the following manner:

1. The day before the hanging, the condemned prisoner is taken out of his (or her) cell. He or she is then weighed (while clothed) and the weight is recorded.

2. The hangman consults the Table of Drops, which specifies length of drop (and therefore, length of hangman’s rope) required for that weight, such that the drop will produce a clean, quick break of the neck.

3. The rope is measured and marked at the correct length, either with a painted lne or a length of metal wire wrapped around the rope at the correct point. A noose is tied at the end and then the rope is affixed to the gallows.

4. Sandbags equal in weight to the prisoner to be hung, are tied to the noose and the trapdoor is opened. The sandbags drop, stretching out the rope. This is done a full 24 hours before hanging, to take the elasticity out of the rope to prevent recoil later on.

5. On the day, the prisoner is marched out to the gallows. The noose is put around his neck and slightly off-center so that when the rope pulls tight, it breaks the neck. A prayer is said and the prisoner is allowed last words. He may or may not choose to have a black hood placed over his head.

6. The lever is pulled. The trapdoor falls open and the prisoner falls through. If the hanging is successful, the momentum of the body draws the noose tight and the sudden deceleration causes a quick and painless break of the neck.

7. The body is then cut down and prepared for postmortem examinations. In older times, a body was left hanging on the rope for up to an hour after death. This was eventually deemed unnecessary when a physician could just check the body and announce whether death had or had not occurred.

8. The rope is removed from the gallows and stored. This is in case it might be required later by law-enforcement or prison officials.

The hanging is done.

The Hangman’s Calculation

If you do a bit of research, you’ll find out that Tables of Drops changed markedly over the years. Starting in about 1888, they changed at least twice in the next 30 years, once in the 1890s and once again in 1913, with differing weights and drops for each new table. How do you figure out how much rope is needed for any given drop?

Remember that the tables are a guide. They only give the suggested drop-length, the length calculated to be most effective. But as I explained, not everyone is the same, so there are variables that might make the Table of Drops ineffective for any number of reasons, from a person being over the maximum weight in the Table of Drops, to their neck being particularly thick or the rope being thinner or thicker than usual. So how do you figure out the drop?

You use a piece of mathematics called the Hangman’s Calculation. It’s set up in the following manner:

(1260 / W ) + 1.5 = D.

1260 foot-pounds of force (the amount considered sufficient to cause neck-breakage), divided by the prisoner’s WEIGHT (W), with an added 1.5ft (18 inches or 1’6″) of rope for the noose itself, equals the optimum drop-length for a given person.

Despite all the maths and calculations, hanging remains a bit of a trial-and-error way of execution. Even when the Tables of Drops were well-established in society, it wasn’t unknown for bungled hangings to occur, and the condemned could still strangle to death or have their heads ripped off during botched hangings. Although no longer widely practiced in the Western world, hanging is still a very common method of execution in Asia in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Bali, where there are significant drug-trafficking problems.

 
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Morbid Fancies: Victorian Mourning Jewellery

To say that the Victorians had an obsession with death is putting it mildly. They were addicted to death; fascinated by it; entranced by it! Everyone has some sort of morbid interest in death, but to the Victorians, death and the rituals surrounding it were as important to them as the rituals concerning life. This fascination with death followed the Victorians everywhere and they revelled in it as much as they were repulsed by it. It was during the Victorian era that big leaps in medical science were being made. People were now starting to live longer, happier, healthier lives. But everyone knew that death was just below the surface. And everyone from Queen Victoria downwards, was fascinated by the subject. When her husband died, Queen Victoria wore black mourning dress for the rest of her life and she would sleep with a cast of Prince Albert’s hand next to her pillow so that she could hold him as she slept! She insisted that every single day, her husband’s clothes should be laid out, that his breakfast be prepared and that hot water be brought to his room every morning so that he could shave…even though he was already dead!

The queen was also fascinated by seances, psychics, mystics and the paranormal and this craze soon caught on with her subjects. It even became popular starting in the 1850s, to have mourning portraits done! What is a mourning portrait? Have a look below…

Also called a memorial portrait or a mourning photograph, these were photographs of the deceased taken shortly after death so that living relatives would always have a pictorial reminder of their dead loved ones to keep with them all the time. If you haven’t figured it out yet…the girl in the middle of her two parents is a corpse, dressed as she was in life and photographed leaning against her father’s chest.

Mourning portraits hit their peak before the turn of the last century and gradually died out during the early 1900s. But one of the most famous examples of the Victorian obsession with death isn’t the mourning portraiture, it isn’t Queen Victoria sleeping with her husband’s hand and it isn’t laying out clothes and preparing shaving water for a ghost who never comes to use them…it’s mourning-jewellery.

What is Mourning Jewellery?

Mourning jewellery was jewellery worn by both men and women on the occasion of a friend or relative’s death. Going into mourning traditionally meant wearing black attire for a period during and after the funeral, but also meant wearing mourning-jewellery.

Of course, mourning jewellery does predate the Victorian era, it’s been around for centuries, but it was a style of jewellery that is most closely associated with the Victorians due to their constant awareness of the fragility of life and the strict protocol that they had to follow when in mourning for a loved one. Pictured below is a typical example of Victorian mourning-jewellery:

If you think this is an ordinary watch-chain…think again. This is a Victorian-era mourning chain which a man would wear with his pocketwatch on the event of a relation or a close friend dying. Want to up the creep-factor? Those braids in the watch-fob aren’t made of cotton. That’s actual human hair! It was common in Georgian and Victorian times to keep lengths of hair from loved ones and braid it into ropes, necklaces and fobs to act as remembrance-tokens of deceased relatives.

Why Did People Wear Mourning-Jewellery?

Upon a person’s death, it’s always been traditional in Western society to wear black during a funeral. It was also traditional for a period after the funeral, to continue wearing black to indicate that you were in mourning for a close friend or relative who had recently died. Victorian morals dictated that it was disrespectful to wear glitzy, flashy jewellery when you were in mourning. Stuff like diamond earrings and pearl necklaces, solid gold pockewatch-chains and sapphire rings were to be worn for celebratory purposes such as weddings and anniversaries! They were totally unacceptable accessories to wear when mourning for a dead loved one! It was to fill in this empty hole in the jewellery market that mourning-jewellery was created.


A Victorian-era mourning-ring, again incorporating a lock of the deceased’s hair

People purchased and wore mourning-jewellery so that they could continue to dress up, but in what they felt was a more sombre and respectful manner, to reflect their current status of mourning. A wide range of mourning-jewellery was manufactured for both men and women, but it was almost always black, or at least had life and death motifs in their designs, such as hearts, coffins and skulls.

Traditions of Victorian Mourning

If Victorian social etiquette was strict, then Victorian mourning etiquette or protocol was evern stricter! Upon the death of a loved one, both men and women were expected to follow strict rules on how society expected them to act, dress and conduct themselves around others. Upon the death of a husband, a widow was expected to go into a period of Full Mourning, also called First Mourning, for 366 days exactly. During this time she was only allowed to wear black and could not appear in public without it. Neither was she allowd out in public without a black mourning-veil over her face to show that she was now a widow. If the woman was poor or if she had children to support, she was allowed to look for a new husband after this period of full mourning. If, however, she had no dependents or serious need for money, she would then enter a period of Second Mourning, which lasted for nine months.

Second Mourning meant a relaxation of the rules. The veil could be removed or at least raised when out in public, but mourning etiquette dictated that black was still the only colour that was permissible for clothing. It was during this nine-month period of Second Mourning that mourning-jewellery was created, and it would be the only kind of jewellery that a widow was allowed to wear until the official ending of her mourning.

After Second Mourning came the final stage of traditional Victorian mourning: Third Mourning. Also called half-mourning, a widow’s Third Mourning lasted anywhere from three to six months. During this time she could gradually start wearing more colourful and sociable clothing again. She would put away her mourning jewellery and start wearing ordinary jewellery again. If she was an independent woman or a woman of means, now was the time that society considered it acceptable for her to start looking for a new husband. Some women never got over the deaths of their husbands, however, and they could wear mourning-dress and mourning-jewellery right up until their own deaths. Queen Victoria was an extreme example of this. Her husband died in 1861, but she remained in mourning-dress for the rest of her life, another forty years, until her own death in 1901!

Mourning traditions for men were similar to women in that they were expected to wear black and wear no jewellery, or mourning-jewellery only, but male mourning protocol was different from womens’ mourning protocol because of the man’s role in society. A widower who had lost his wife was expected to mourn for two years, however as with women with dependents, if a man had children to care for, society did allow for him to end mourning sooner and go back to conducting business or work. An unmarried man who had lost a close relation such as a mother, sister or cousin, might carry out the full three stages of mourning, same as widows did, lasting the full roughly two to two-and-a-half years. With people dying every single day, you can bet that the industry concerned with the manufacture and sale of mourning-jewellery was big business in the Victorian era.

What was Mourning Jewellery Made Of?

One of the most popular materials used for the manufacture of mourning-jewellery was a semiprecious gemstone called jet. From which we get the term “jet black”. Although it was tricky to cut and carve, jet became very popular for jewellery during the second half of the 1800s up into the 1920s. An example of jet mourning-jewellery is shown below:

This 19th century mourning-brooch is made of jet

Jet was used to make traditional mourning-jewellery such as watch-fobs, necklaces, rings, clasps and brooches, but as mentioned above, the other popular material for the manufacture of mourning-jewellery was human hair! Not always black, it was common for people to keep a lock of a loved one’s hair after their death and perserve it as a momento of their deceased relatives. Depending on the amount of hair taken from the corpse, the momento might be braided into a rope and used to make a watch-chain (such as the one above) or a necklace. Shorter snippets of hair might be placed inside mourning-lockets such as the one pictured below:

Mourning lockets such as this one (made of gold, black enamel and pearls) were another very popular piece of Victorian-era mourning-jewellery and they often had little compartments or windows in the back where a lock of the deceased’s hair could be stored as a momento. Lockets like this one would have had a chain or ribbon run through the ring at the top of the locket and then it would be tied and hung around the widow’s neck as a pendant and necklace.

The End of Mourning Jewellery

Rather fittingly, the Victorian protocol of mourning, along with Victorian mourning jewellery, ended…with Victoria. When the queen died in 1901, traditional Victorian mourning clothes, jewellery and protocol died with her. People no longer wanted to wear black and be reminded all the time, of the constant presence of death. Changing values meant that such things were taboo and shouldn’t be mentioned in polite society. Death was everywhere and there was no need to have to remind people of it all the time. As the 20th Century progressed, Victorian-era views on mourning, how one should conduct oneself when in mourning, how long mourning should last and what a person could or could not wear during mourning, rapidly began to die away. A hundred and ten years after Queen Victoria died, all that most people today would know about traditional mourning rituals and protocol is that it’s traditional to wear black. Other aspects, such as the once common fashion of wearing mourning-jewellery, has been consigned to the graveyard of history.

 
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A City Divided: The History of the Berlin Wall

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
– Former President Ronald Reagan; Berlin, 12th of June, 1987.

There are a lot of famous walls throughout history. Hadrian’s Wall. The Great Wall of China. The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem…but walls are built for a lot of reasons. To protect, to defend, to hold up an important building…or to seperate a people. In this last category we have one of the most famous walls of all. The Berliner Mauer…the Berlin Wall.

For those born after the era of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall is something you read about in your history-books. It sure as hell was something I read in my history-books when I was in school even though when I was born, the Berlin Wall was still up. It’s a structure that’s fascinated me because it’s something that we imagine was built a long time ago and which was pulled down a long time ago and was significant a long time ago…but ain’t anymore, which is why it’s in the history books. But it wasn’t! It was still around when I was a kid, even if I wasn’t aware of it. And that was just a little over twenty years ago, which is a tick of a clock in the eyes of history. So what was the Berlin Wall? Where did it come from? What was it for? How did it come down and how did you get to the other side?

The Berlin Wall was a product of the Cold War that started escalating as soon as the ‘hot’ Second World War started cooling down in 1945. To understand where the wall came from, we need to crank the clock back over sixty years to the close of World War Two and what happened immediately after it.

Berlin, Germany, 1945

Japan is defeated. Germany has surrendered. The nuclear bombs have blasted Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the history books and the German capital of Berlin has been pulverised to rubble. It has been shelled, bombed and blasted for days and weeks on end by Allied bomber-planes and Russian field-artillery during the Battle of Berlin. The Allies have steamrollered in against the desperate and pathetic defences thrown up by the Nazis that consist of Hitler Youth divisions and World War One veterans pressed into service for the ‘Fatherland’. The Soviet Hammer and Sickle flag flies over the Reichstag, the German parliament building. The war is over.

…or not.

The moment the Second World War ended, another war started. A war between ideologies. Between the capitalists and the communists. The Western Allies were not idiots. The Germans had started the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War and the Second World War. And the Allies weren’t about to let the Krauts have another crack at the cannons, so to ensure they couldn’t, the German nation was occupied.

Germany was split in two. The Americans, the British and the French took joint control of West Germany while the Soviets took control of East Germany. So far, so good. But what to do with the German capital city of Berlin? The problem was that Berlin was located smack bang in the middle of East Germany. The Allies refused to allow the capital to become communist, so the city too, was divided up. Eventually, Germany and its capital were split into two camps. On the West was the Federal Republic of Germany. On the East was the German Democratic Republic. The names sound very similar, but how they operated was very different.

The Berlin Airlift; 1948

Trying to sieze control of the German capital, the Soviets attempted to starve Berlin into submission. All road transport and rail transport to Berlin was cut off. Roads and railway lines were barricaded and utility-supplies were cut off. The Allies were not happy. They wanted their slice of Berlin. And they wanted it now.

Berlin was no longer seen as the ‘enemy’. It was not Nazified anymore. It was an ordinary city just like any other. But it was a city that wanted to be free and capitalist and which was being held hostage by the Reds who wanted it all for themselves. The people of Berlin were trapped in a hole.

It was to save the citizens of Berlin that the Allies started the ambitious ‘Berlin Airlift’ in 1948. The airlift was nothing less than dozens of day-and-night deliveries of food, clothing and other supplies to the city of Berlin by air, from West Germany to East Germany. The Soviets were trying to starve the city into submission and the West wasn’t about to let that happen. The airlift began.

The Berlin Airlift ran from June, 1948 until April of 1949. During those few months, Western planes flew over Berlin, dropping parachute-lowered supplies of food to the people of Berlin. Everything from milk to bread to chocolate bars were dropped into Berlin to keep the morale of the people high and their bodies healthy. The airlift was a big success and a total humiliation to the Soviets who thought that they could overpower the West and keep a stranglehold on the German capital. When the Soviets realised that the West would not stop with its airlift, they had to admit defeat and the blockade on Berlin was lifted.

It was after this time that Berlin was divided into two cities, informally at first, but as time went on, in more and more physical ways.

Berlin: Gateway to the West (1949-1961)

When the Soviet blockade of Berlin failed, the Soviets had to bow to pressure from the West to divide Berlin between the Capitalists and the Communists, just like the rest of the country. This division formally took place in 1949. For the next forty-one years, West Berlin would become an island of capitalism amid a sea of communism, surrounded on all sides by East Berlin and East Germany. East Berlin, by comparison, became part of the Soviet Union, a prison city with its people under siege. If you think that Berliners were all cool with this and just went back to building luxury cars, eating bratwurst and watching soccer on TV…then let me correct you.

Berliners were terrified of living under the heel of the Soviets. They had absolutely no desire at all to live in a Soviet city. They wanted out. And they wanted out NOW. Between 1949 and 1961, thousands of East Berlin citizens fled to the West. They moved across the border, they took the subway to Western stations and they packed everything into their cars and drove! Berliners were getting scared off and the Soviets were getting pissed off. Not only did thousands of fleeing civilians make the Soviets look big and scary and mean…which they probably were…but it also meant that a lot of vital manpower and skilled labour was running out of East Berlin as fast as their feet could take them! There was no Berlin Wall during these years of the city’s history and East Berliners could flee to the West with relative ease, however, Berliners weren’t the only people running.

Germans fleeing the Soviets wasn’t just confined to the citizens of Berlin. East-Germans everywhere were fleeing from the Soviets, not just those living in the capital. However where East Germans could flee to was confined to Berlin. If this is confusing, then let me explain.

People living in East Germany, controlled by the Soviets, wanted to get out of Soviet territory into Western territory, where they felt safe. Only, they couldn’t go from East Germany to West Germany due to travel-restrictions. However, there was no reason why the Soviets should restrict travel within East Germany. And Berlin was in East Germany. So Germans wanting to flee the Soviets went to Berlin instead. And they entered the city through East Berlin and then went to West Berlin, where they could fly out of the city and over Soviet Germany to the capitalist West Germany, nice and far away from the Reds. It was a roundabout way of escaping the Soviets, but it did work. And it was something that the Soviets were wising up to. And they weren’t having any of it.

See, once you got into Berlin, it was easy to get to the West. There was no barrier and once you got the paperwork you could just go across, or you could simply hop on the Berlin subway system and take a train that was going to a West Berlin station. It was pretty easy. The Soviets were worried that it was too easy. They were worrying about a ‘brain drain’ on East Germany. They were scared that all the talent, knowledge, brains and know-how of the East Germans would flood into the West leaving East Germany and East Berlin as a dried up husk of a place full of idiots. So to stop this, they built a wall.

The Berlin Wall; 1961

Even though there had been tension between the Soviets and the West ever since the end of the Second World War in 1945, it wasn’t until 1961 that the Soviets actually tried in any serious capacity, to stop people from getting to the West. This all changed on the night of the 12th of August, 1961. That evening, the order was given for the border between East and West Berlin to be officially closed and for a wall to be erected. In the truest form of German efficiency, the wall was put up in record time! By six o’clock in the morning of the 13th of August…Berlin was a city divided. A wall ran all the way from the northern border of Berlin down the middle of the city to the south of Berlin. People in East Berlin suddenly realised that the Soviets were serious about keeping them penned in, and they were not happy.


1961; Building the Berlin Wall

What some people may not know is that the Berlin Wall was not just one wall. It was a series of walls. Berliner Mauer Model A came out in 1961 as a simple, slap-up overnight job of wood, brick, concrete blocks and barbed wire. People who were desperate or quick-witted enough, could still get across to the West. They got through the wall by pushing or cutting away the barbed wire fences and running to the West, they even used car-bombs to blast holes in the wall so that they could get through. They rushed checkpoints and some people even just climbed out the window! Yes it’s true.

See, to make the wall in 1961 in record time, the East German army took a few shortcuts. Where possible, they followed roads and streets to make the wall as straight and as short as possible. They incorporated the walls of buildings into this first generation of the wall so as to speed up construction. But what they probably forgot was that…buildings have doors and windows…duh!

So when East Berliners woke up and found themselves imprisoned, some citizens realised that their houses and apartment blocks had been incorporated into this new wall. What did they do? They packed their suitcases and jumped out the window or broke open their own front doors, ran across the street and over to the West. The Soviets were quick to see the loophole in their design, however, and quickly bricked up windows and doorframes that opened out into West Berlin.

In the early days of the Berlin Wall, it wasn’t so much a wall as it was a fence. Because the wall was put up so fast, the East German soldiers used the simplest materials to build it. Cinderblocks, barbed wire and bricks. In some areas of the wall, the only thing keeping East and West Berliners apart was a few feet of barbed wire stretched out across a road. People who were brave or desperate enough, could just jump over the wire into the West. That’s exactly what East German soldier Conrad Schumann did on the 15th of August, 1961. That’s him up there in that photograph, jumping over the barbed wire division between East and West, defecting from Soviet Germany to the capitalist West. Schumann wasn’t the only person to do this, however. Hundreds of people took advantage in one way or another, of the hasty construction of this first version of the Berlin Wall, to change their lives forever…and in most cases, for the better.


Berlin’s historic Brandenburg Gate is right in the middle of the city. This photo taken in mid-August, 1961, shows East German soldiers forming a human blockade in front of the gate, preventing East-to-West migration after the border was officially declared closed

The Berlin Wall; 1962-1965

Like I mentioned above, the Berlin Wall was not one single structure. It was several structures that changed, evolved and which were torn down and rebuilt several times over the years. By 1962, a second, more permanent wall was being built between East and West Berlin. The Soviets could see that their initial barrier was not working and that it needed strengthening. Between 1962 and 1965, the second and eventually, third versions of the Berlin Wall were constructed, not of bricks or cinderblocks, but of huge slabs of concrete that were tough, high and impossible to blast through, ram with cars or climb over. Anyone who did try to climb over the wall was impeded by a smooth, cylindrical drainage-pipe which the East-Germans put on top of the wall. The smooth curved surface on top of the wall made it impossible for people climbing over to get a grip and pull themselves up, over and into West Berlin. It was around this time that the wall was also lengthened as well as strengthened.

Eventually, by the early 1970s, the Berlin Wall didn’t just divide the city, it completely encircled it. The entirety of West Berlin was surrounded by a huge, twelve-foot high wall of solid concrete sections that completely cut it off from all of East Germany that was around it on all sides…to say nothing of it also cutting it off from East Berlin.

Getting Through the Wall

Life in Soviet Berlin is hardly pleasant. The East Berlin secret police, the Stasi, keep tabs on everyone. Who they are, what they do, where they live, who they know, what their jobs are, where they are, where they’re going and why they’re going there and what they intend to do once they’ve reached there. Up to one third of the East Berlin population is under surveillance by the Stasi at its peak. Apart from the presence of an oppressive police-state, the quality of living in East Berlin is a pale imitation of life in the West. Although legally still under Allied occupation, people in West Berlin enjoy the latest entertainment, inventions and consumer-goods.

In East Berlin (and indeed, in most of the Soviet Union), basic household necesities are in short supply. Whitegoods for the home, automobiles, televisions and other appliances and machinery that the West take for granted are sold to the East Berliners on a first-come, first-serve basis. People have to go on waiting-lists that can last for weeks…months…even years…before they can even think of buying something that their Western counterparts could go out and buy at the shop the next day. The severe shortage of Soviet-made consumer-goods means that life under communism is hardly the “Worker’s Paradise” that the Soviets were hoping to achieve.

In the early days of the existence of the Berlin Wall, getting across to the West was relatively easy. You just needed a bit of luck and good timing. But after the first few weeks and months, the Berlin Wall has become an imposing and impassable barrier. Getting across is much harder. People get through by using forged identity and travel-permits and passports, they dig tunnels, they’re smuggled through the checkpoints in automobiles; two families gather up a whole heap of cloth and even floated over the Wall to the West using a homemade hot-air balloon! But nobody actually climbs over the wall to escape to the West, and here’s why…

The Berlin Wall; 1975

In 1975, the fourth and final version of the Berlin Wall was constructed. This wall is less like a simple wall and more like the impenetrable perimeter-fence of a maximum-security prison. It consists of two huge walls, watch-towers, trip-wires, barbed-wire fences, ditches, machine-guns, spotlights and vehicular-traps to prevent cars getting through. Between the two walls that made up this great barrier, apart from the tripwires, guns, searchlights, sirens, barbed-wire fences and the guards, there was also a kill-zone and even attack-dogs on long leashes! As you can see, getting across conventionally was not going to be easy, and 171 people died trying to do it. The most famous person who gave his life to freedom in this dramatic way was an 18-year-old East Berlin teenager…

Peter Fechter and his friend, Helmut Kulbeik attempted to jump Berlin Wall #2 in 1962. Kulbeik made it across safely but Fechter was shot in the leg by East Berlin guards. Although only a single shot was fired, the bullet severed a major artery in his injured leg and Fechter would bleed to death on the Soviet side of the wall, just a few feet from freedom. Western powers were outraged, but could do nothing to help him get across due to the threat of Soviet violence. The photograph above was taken by a Western photographer as Fechter lay bleeding on the ground. His body was eventually removed by East Berlin authorities.


A diagram showing what the Berlin Wall looked like, ca. 1980

The Berlin Wall; 1989

By the 1980s, generations of Berliners and people around the world had grown up with the Berlin Wall. It was a part of their lives. It was a part of world affairs. It was a part of Berlin. Nobody ever envisioned a day when it might not be a part of their lives, the news, the world at large or a part of Berlin. It had simply been there too long for it to suddenly just disappear! And even if it was going to be pulled down, it would take some huge, amazing, monumental and earthshaking events to even get the Soviets thinking about such a ludicrous thing…right?

Well probably. We’ll never know. Because that’s not how the wall came down. Believe it or not but the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall happened quite literally by accident.

It is the 9th of November, 1989. The Berlin Wall has fallen! People are streaming across the border between East and West Berlin. A momentous and historic occasion! But how did it happen?

To understand, we need to backtrack a few weeks. In August of 1989, other countries in the Eastern Bloc are beginning to relax travel restrictions, even if East Germany is not. Border controls between Austria and Hungary are relaxed. People start moving freely between these two countries. Amongst these people are East Germans. While in Hungary, East Germans take refuge in the West-German embassy in Budapest, not wanting to go back to East Germany. This show of resistence sparks off a series of protests throughout East Germany by people who want to be free. East German travel-restrictions are amongst the tightest in the Soviet Union and the people are getting tired of them. Not wanting a full-scale riot on their hands, East German authorities decided to allow for a relaxation of travel-restrictions between East and West Germany. This relaxation of such restrictions was supposed to start on the 17th of November, 1989. But it all went wrong from there.

The person charged with the job of spreading the news about the relaxed travel-restrictions between East and West Germany was a man named Gunter Schabowski, an official working for the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the communist party that ruled over East Germany during the Soviet era. Schabowski had been told about the relaxation of travel-restrictions…a last-ditch attempt by East German politicians to stop the rising tensions in East Germany…but he had not been fully briefed on when these relaxations of restrictions were to take effect.

On the 9th of November, 1989, Schabowski was a member of a panel being interviewed in a live televised press-conference which was meant to spread word about these modified travel-restrictions. Not in full posession of all the facts, Schabowski was unprepared to give a proper answer when, after announcing the plan to relax travel-restrictions, a journalist asked a single, simple question.

“When?”

Unaware of the actual date (17th of November), Schabowski consults his papers. Mumbling and fumbling for time, he accidently says “Immediately!”.

And that was the simple accident that caused the downfall of the Berlin Wall.

His one word sealed the Wall’s doom. Within hours, hundreds of East Berliners were charging towards the crossing-points between East and West Berlin, along the length of the Berlin Wall. They had heard about the opening of the border and they wanted out of East Germany and into West Germany. And they wanted it now! Border-guards were caught off-guard by the rush of hundreds and eventually thousands of people. Unable to hold their posts and been given no instructions not to let people go through, the guards opened the gates allowing thousands of people to stream from East Berlin into West Berlin! The Wall was now starting to fall.


The famous ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ border-crossing of the Berlin Wall; November 9th, 1989

Over the next few weeks and months, Berliners from both sides of the city would crowd at the wall to meet, greet and party and to celebrate the hopeful reunification of their city and their country, split in half by nearly fifty years of opposing political camps. People even showed up at the Wall carrying sledgehammers, pickaxes, jackhammers and drills. These were the “Wall Woodpeckers”, ordinary civilians who had come along to quite literally get a piece of the action. Over the next months and years, the Berlin Wall would be torn down, bit by bit, piece by piece, yard by yard. While most of it would be torn down with mechanised help, several Berliners hack into the structure of oppression with ordinary hand-tools, chipping off chunks of the Wall to keep as souveniers.

The Wall Today

The majority of the Berlin Wall was pulled down during the early 1990s as people rushed to bring an end to communism in Germany. Some sections still remain, although these are few and far between. In Berlin today, a cobblestone line runs through the city, marking the path that the Wall once took through the streets of the German capital.


A segment of the Berlin Wall (left, with all the graffitti) in central Berlin today

 
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A Medical Monster: The Story of the Elephant Man

Imagine if you will, that you were born normally. That life was normal and that everything in it was good. But then suppose you started developing a horrible, disfiguring condition that would cripple your whole body, that would contort it and twist it and bend it and affect the very bones of your skeleton. Imagine that this condition is untreatable and incurable and that you would have to live your entire life as a misshapen and horrific monster, shunned by society all over the world. Imagine that this is real…and that it happened a hundred years ago, when such people more likely than not, either died horribly alone, or became freakish attractions at travelling carnival shows that toured the country, exposing your horrific, twisted form for all to see, to be shocked by and to laugh at, to be repulsed by and to be terrified of.

Meet the Elephant Man.

Who was the Elephant Man?

His name was Joseph Carey Merrick, born on the 5th of August, 1862. For almost all of his rather short life, Merrick was known as a horribly deformed freak, so ugly that even his family would have nothing to do with him. He lived in workhouses, he joined a travelling circus and he became famous for all the wrong reasons, with people being drawn to see him purely to see if such a person as Merrick could really exist on Earth. His life is a mixture of loneliness, desperation, hope, compassion and understanding.

Joseph Merrick was born in the city of Leicester in England in August, 1862. He was the first of three children born to Joseph Rockley and Mary Jane Merrick. Up until the age of about five, Merrick was normal, but then he began to show the symptoms that would mark his place in history. His skin grew at a disproportionate rate to his body. It thickened up and toughened and his skeleton and joints began gradually to deform. Gradually, his spine and the majority of his body would become horribly twisted and his skin would become thick, rough and dry, which gave him the name the ‘Elephant Man’. So bad were Merrick’s deformities that he was unable to walk properly. A fall as a child badly damaged his left hip which left him with a permanent limp.

Suffering from constant abuse from his family, Merrick left home permanently at the age of seventeen. Throughout his teenage years, he struggled to find work. His increasing deformities and physical limits meant that he was unable to do even the most basic of menial jobs, such as cigar-rolling (which he had to stop when his right hand became too deformed), street-hawker and door-to-door salesman. His mother, the only person who showed him any affection, died on the 19th of May, 1873.

His father’s brother, and therefore, Joseph’s uncle, Charles Merrick, was a local barber and attempted to give Merrick a safe and comfortable home, but the strains of his deformities and the medical bills associated with them meant that Charles could only support his unfortunate nephew for a short period of time and before long, Joseph Merrick ended up back in the streets before ending up in the local workhouse, where he lived on and off, for four years. In 1882, Joseph underwent an operation to try and correct some of the most serious deformities around his mouth, to allow him to speak and eat better.

Joseph Merrick: The Freak Show

Increasingly unable to find work, Merrick turned to becoming a human freak to try and support himself. He became acquainted with two men, Samuel Torr and Thomas Norman, a pair of freakshow managers. Merrick first approached Torr who referred him to Norman. By now, Merrick was suffering increasingly from the symptoms of his mystery illness and was having a harder and harder time speaking and eating due to bronchitis. Norman managed to secure medical help and Merrick recovered to a level where he was able to ‘perform’ as a human freak.


Tom Norman, Merrick’s freakshow manager

For a while, Merrick did well. Norman made Merrick a moderately wealthy man and Merrick managed to earn about two hundred pounds, a decent sum of money for sideshow freaks. Merrick lived in a back room of Norman’s curiosity shop and for a small fee of 1d (a penny), folks could go into the shop’s back room and be amazed and horrified by the ‘Elephant Man’ as Norman called his new discovery.

By chance, Norman’s shop was directly across the road from Whitechapel’s main medical institution, the London Hospital, a charity hospital for the poor of the East End since Georgian times. One of the visitors to the Elephant Man freak-show was a surgeon named Mr. Frederick Treves. Treves was horrified by Merrick’s disfigurements and suggested to Norman that he submit Merrick to a medical examination, to which Merrick and Norman both agreed.

To aid in Merrick’s short journey from the shop to the hospital, a special set of clothing was developed for Merrick so that people would not be frightened by his horrific appearance. The most famous article of which was the famous masked cap, which was reproduced for the film ‘The Elephant Man’.


Joseph Merrick’s hooded cap, that covered his face from public scrutiny

Merrick visited the London Hospital three times. Treves the surgeon took measurements of Merrick’s head and body, examined his health and other bodily anomilies, such as his limp. Treves photographed Merrick and in one of their meetings, gave the ‘Elephant Man’ his calling-card in case he might ever require his assistance. Merrick had grown tired of being poked, prodded, exhibited, measured and photographed at the hospital and wasn’t keen to return.

By the late Victorian period, tastes in entertainment were changing. People didn’t want to see freak-shows anymore. They considered them inhumane, degrading and immoral. There were several police crackdowns and eventually, even the well-meaning Mr. Norman had to close his shop down. Merrick then went on a tour of Europe and headed to Belgium.

While in Europe, Merrick was again abused and tricked and he lost most of the small fortune that Norman had helped him to earn. Broken and ill, Merrick sailed back to England and caught a train to London.

Frederick Treves – Surgeon

Merrick returned to London on the 24th of June, 1886. When he arrived in London, he got off the train at Liverpool Street Station. He was incredibly sick, suffering from malnutrition and again from bronchitis. His deformities meant he was unable to speak clearly and when he asked for help at the station, people were unable to understand him, and even more unable to look at him. A passing policeman forced away the crowd that was now forming around Merrick and took him away to an empty waiting room where Merrick collapsed in the corner, exhausted and hungry. Unable to speak, Merrick took out the one thing that could make himself be understood by others…Frederick Treves’s calling-card.

Treves was sent for at once and he immediately had Merrick admitted to the London Hospital for examination and treatment. Treves discovered that not only was Merrick suffering from a lack of food, a bronchial condition and increased impediment from his deformities, but that he was also suffering from a heart-condition.

Treves deduced from Merrick’s general condition that he was already dying. Slowly and surely, but dying nonetheless and he suspected that the Elephant Man would only have a few years left to live. It was clear to Treves that Merrick needed somewhere safe to stay. He couldn’t go back to being a travelling freak, that was for sure, and no workhouse would accept him as an inmate. Treves appealed to the chairman of the London Hospital, Mr. Francis Carr Gomm. While Carr Gomm allowed Merrick to be admitted to the hospital as a patient requiring treatment and while he understood the necessity for long-term care and constant medical supervision for one Mr. Joseph Carey Merrick, he was unwilling to allow Merrick to stay at the hospital. The London was a charity hospital for the poor which relied on donations from the public to keep operating. It simply did not have the staff or the funds to keep Merrick at the hospital interminably, as an ‘incurable’. Indeed, the hospital had a longstanding policy of not housing incurables due to the strain on the hospital’s system.


Joseph Merrick photographed in 1888. Note the extreme difference in size between his right and left arms

Unwilling to throw Merrick out into the street, Mr. Carr Gomm wrote letters to hospitals and medical institutions that specialised in long-term care for the terminally ill, however, none of them were willing to take on such a difficult case as that of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, and they all said ‘No’. In desperation, Carr Gomm wrote a letter to the Times newspaper, asking the public for suggestions about what to do with Merrick and how to handle his long-term security. To the hospital’s surprise, the public outpouring of compassion was significant. Although nobody who had read the letter in the newspaper could offer a single practical solution as to what should be done with Merrick, many readers of the Times did the next best thing that they could think of, and dug into their pockets, donating money to the London Hospital to keep Merrick in comfortable circumstances.

With such an influx of money, Carr-Gomm put it to the hospital committee that they could, with more public assistance, see to it that Merrick would live at the London Hospital as a permanent patient until the end of his life. This was an unprecedented step in the history of the London, but the committee eventually agreed. Merrick was moved into a small suite of rooms in a quiet part of the hospital where he could live, safe and comfortably for the rest of his life.

Life at The London

For probably the first time in his life, Merrick felt safe and welcome and comfortable. He passed the time in his rooms by reading, writing and constructing models out of cardboard. So as not to distress Merrick any further, Frederick Treves insisted that under no circumstances was a mirror ever to be present in Merrick’s chambers.

As time passed, Treves and Merrick developed a friendship. Although intelligble speech on Merrick’s part was almost impossible, the two men were able to converse and Merrick told the surgeon as much as he dared, about his early life, his family and his time as a travelling freak. Treves changed his views about Merrick very quickly after this; he had previously assumed that Merrick was mentally retarded as well as being hideously deformed.


Merrick photographed in 1889, showing the severe contortions of his body

Shunned by society, Merrick was not used to the attention that people now gave him. He asked Treves on several occasions, to tell him about the “real world”, a place he would most likely never see. He even asked the surgeon to show him a ‘real house’; to comply, Treves took Merrick to visit his wife and to see his own house and what it looked like. Merrick met more and more people and eventually became a small celebrity in his own way. Never able to have a relationship with a woman and to have a girlfriend or a fiance, at one point, Treves even thought of sending Merrick to an institute for the blind, where Merrick might meet a girl who would not see his deformities. But when he decided that such an institute would not be able to care for the Elephant Man, he discarded the idea.

Mr. Carr Gomm’s letter to the Times had been read by thousands of people by this time and soon, the rich, powerful and elite were fascinated by this strange and misshapen creature that others called the ‘Elephant Man’. They came to meet Merrick and even sent him presents. As Merrick grew more and more used to this, he would occasionally leave his rooms and wander around. He would take strolls in the hospital grounds at night when everyone else was asleep and occasionally he even wandered down into the other wards of the hospital, but the nurses would always send him back to his own rooms, worried that his appearance might shock the other patients.

In 1887, a pair of new buildings were opened at the London Hospital and the Prince and Princess of Wales (the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) came to do the ribbon-cutting. The Princess expressed a desire to meet the Elephant Man and Treves agreed to an introduction at the end of the royal tour. The princess gave Merrick an autographed photo of herself which Merrick is said to have held as one of his most prized posessions ever since.

As was shown in the film, at least once in his life, Merrick was able to attend a night at the theatre, a lifelong wish of his that he was never previously able to do.

Merrick’s Last Years

Despite the care and constant medical treatment given to him by the London Hospital, Merrick’s deformities continued to worsen. It’s believed that Merrick began to suffer from depression and he wanted more and more to do things that other people could do. One of these was to sleep like other people. Due to the immense weight of his skull, Merrick could not sleep lying down like others do; the sheer weight of bone would crush his throat and neck and kill him. Instead, he always slept more or less in the fetal position, with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up and his head resting upon them.

On the 11th of April, a house surgeon at the London Hospital came to check on Merrick at three o’clock that afternoon. He discovered Merrick lying in bed with his head upon a pillow…dead. Everyone in the hospital knew that Merrick was unable to sleep in that position, but nobody could say what made Merrick do it. Was it suicide? Or merely a desire at last, to be like other people? Was it an accident that Merrick might have slipped in his sleep? Nobody was entirely sure, but on the death certificate, Merrick’s cause of death was put down as “Asphyxia” and “Accidental”. Although identity of the corpse was hardly necessary, Joseph Merrick’s uncle, the barber Charles Merrick (mentioned earlier in this article) came to London to formally identify the body.

Fittingly, it was Mr. Treves himself who performed the autopsy on Merrick’s body. His finding was that, just as Merrick had always told him…if he ever laid down to sleep, he would die quite literally of a broken neck, which proved to be the case. Treves took casts of Merrick’s deformities and even took skin-samples. Eventually, at the end of the post-mortem examinations, Treves had Merrick’s skeleton mounted on a frame. This skeleton, together with personal effects, forms part of a small Elephant Man museum at the London Hospital.

Joseph Carey Merrick, the Elephant Man…was twenty-seven years old.

Diagnosing the Elephant Man

Exactly what the ‘Elephant Man’ suffered from has been a matter of debate for over a hundred years. Victorian doctors, while able to treat some of Merrick’s symptoms, were unable to tell what caused his deformities and could not provide Merrick with a cure. It is believed that Merrick most likely suffered from Proteus Syndrome, a severe congential disorder that affects the skin and bone-structures of the body. The main symptoms include excessive skin-growth, the appearance of tumors on the body and abnormal bone-growth. It is an extremely rare disease with only a few hundred cases worldwide. The causes of Proteus Syndrome are as yet, still not fully understood and a cure is still being developed.

Sir Frederick Treves died in December of 1923 and was remembered as a celebrated and daring surgeon. Apart from treating the Elephant Man, with the aid of another medical bigshot, Sir Joseph Lister, the two men successfully carried out an operation on King Edward VII, curing him of appendicitis just days before his coronation in 1902. Appendicitis had previously been a life-threatening condition on which operations were unsuccessful. Both Lister and Treves were given baronetcies by the king for their services to himself and to the medical profession. Their success at treating the king meant that appendix surgery soon entered mainstream medical treatment. Sir Frederick’s great nephew, also named Frederick Treves, is an actor, who played a small part in the 1980 ‘Elephant Man’ film, in which his great-uncle the surgeon, was portrayed by Anthony Hopkins.

 
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Pen Shows: How To Play with Fire and Not Get Burnt

There’s watch-fairs, gun-shows, knife-shows, antiques markets and even book-fairs. And yes. There’s even pen-shows. And that’s what this article is about.

To the avid pen-collector, visiting a pen-show is like leaving a five-year-old kid inside Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. He won’t care that he’s lost and high and freaking out…he’s bloody loving it, and he won’t want to leave when you come along trying to drag him away, kicking, screaming and giving you a Joe Pesci Special that’d make your ears drop off and your hair turn greener than your neighbour’s lawn. Yes. Pen shows are THAT cool.

There are many benefits to buying your pens from a pen-show instead of eBay or another online seller or from a pen-shop. You can take your time, you can chat and converse, you can examine the goods like a Russian mobster checking out African conflict diamonds and you can haggle, barter and bargain until you’re blue in the face, with the guy behind the table, who will just sit there and say “No”. You can test pens in person and see how they write, regardless of if you do, or do not eventually buy them. You can see an array of pens and writing instruments and equipment that you will never see anywhere else, all in one place and in the flesh. And you can buy amazing pens that you’ve always wanted for your collection, right there, right now, on the table. You can just keep going and going until you’ve had enough. Then you take a break and go some more.

Your First Pen Show

You’ve heard about these things called pen shows. You’re a new collector and you’ve seen other people’s collections online and they’re making you greener with envy than Eggs A’la Seuss. You want those pens. YOU WANT THEM. NOW. You want that deep red, 1920s Duofold, or the sleek, 1942 Skyline. The tasteful 1930s Sheaffer Balance or that 1910s Waterman 52. You’ve only ever seen photos of a solid gold 1905 Conklin Crescent-Filler, or that latest Montblanc Meisterstuck with the diamond star on the end. You. Want. It. NAO!!

But hold on. You need to know how to approach things. That’s what this article is for.

Finding Out about Pen Shows

So, you want to collect fountain pens. Or maybe you already are collecting fountain pens. And you want to know how to collect more. So you hear about these things called ‘pen shows’ where collectors, restorers and retailers sell, trade and chat about pens. Mad and insane as it is, you discover that this is true. But how do you find out where these mystical gatherings take place?

Your best bet is to visit the Fountain Pen Network, the internet’s biggest forum for fountain pen collectors, users, traders, repairers and sellers. Here, you can find out about all the major pen-shows that happen around the world. Most of them take place in the United States; New York, Los Angeles and Washington. But there’s also the London Writing Equipment Show and the Melbourne Pen Show in Australia. Due to the large number of shows, they often jostle for space on the calender and it’s important to check the dates for upcoming shows carefully. Some shows only go for one day each year. Some go for two or three. You need to figure out which shows you can visit and how you’re going to get there and how to transport any potential purchases back home safely. If you discover that there’s a pen show in the city where you live, you’re in luck! Most people travel hundreds of miles to visit these things.

Kitting Up for a Pen Show

You should always bring along the following essentials to any pen show:

– A bottle of ink.
– A notepad.
– Tissue-paper.
– A powerful magnifying glass or loupe.
– Pens of your own.
– Wallet with plenty of cash (not all places have EFTPOS).
– A poweful flashlight.
– A good set of nerves!

Attending the Show

When you reach the venue of the show, remain calm and collected. Head in. Greet any people you know and then wander around. Don’t buy anything…just wander. Take in the show and see where things are, who sells what and how things work. Not every person at a pen show is there to sell stuff. Some people show up merely to display their collections and answer questions. Looking at these collections can give you ideas about what you might want to add to your own growing stash of stuff. Ask questions and learn more and make friends and share knowledge. This is what you’re here for. If you wanted to buy a pen, you should’ve gone to the nearest pen-shop.

Once you’ve acclimatised to the environment and done the obligatory meet-and-greet and seen where things are, you can now take your time and start hunting for the pens you want. Shopping at a pen-show has many advantages over shopping online or at a pen shop. At a show, you can usually touch and handle the stuff you want to buy. You can get expert information and advice (as opposed to the clueless marketing-spiel you get hocked at you from every shop-counter in the universe) and you can test the product before you potentially buy it.

Buying a pen at a pen show is no different from buying a pen anywhere else. With loupe or magnifying-glass in hand, examine the pen minutely. Go over every single square milimeter and check for any and all imperfections and flaws. Decide how perfect a pen you want, ask how much the pen’s being sold for and then ask yourself if you think it’s worth that much and perhaps give a counter-offer. Remember to be civil, polite and friendly. Collectors are mutually trusting of other collectors…don’t do anything to sabotage that trust or you may not be welcome at the same seller’s table next year. Be sure to handle all pens with care, respect and delicacy. Some items for sale can be upwards of one hundred years old or more and they demand a light touch on the part of you, the potential purchaser. Always ask what is for sale, whether you can handle something and whether you can perform a dip-test to see how the pen writes. Not all people are there to sell things and not all people who sell things appreciate everyone fiddling with their merchandise.

Other things to Look out For

Pens are not the only things sold at pen shows. Keep an eye out for stuff like ink, blotting-paper, display-cases, books, diaries, pen-pouches, inkstands, dip-pens, nibs, inkwells, desk-blotters and rocker-blotters. Some shows may even branch out into other areas, selling vintage and antique wristwatches and pocketwatches, pieces of antique ivory and even some knives such as straight-razors, pocketknives and paperknives. It pays to keep your eyes open and wandering, to take in everything that a particular show has to offer.

Tableholding at a Show

If you’re a part of a local pen-collector’s club or a local pen-shop, you may get the chance (either someone offered it to you, or you asked for it specially) to become a tableholder at a pen-show. Remember to show up early, set up your displays and post clear signs about what is and what is not for sale. People will wander all over the place and peek at, and touch things that they want to see. Don’t wander too far from your table at any one time and if you must, then get a trusted party (fellow club-member, for example) to keep an eye on things while you toddle off to induge your pen fantasies. Above all – You should strive to know everything…and I mean everything…about the products on your table, whether they’re for sale or not. Nothing is more boring than asking questions of someone who looks like he should know the answers…and getting nothing in reply. You never know. It might spark a conversation that might lead onto you getting that one pen you’ve always wanted…

Whatever the case, enjoy visiting your next pen show, be it your first, second, third or 72nd! Just remember to have fun.

 
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What the Victorians Did for Us: Necessity is the Mother of Invention

The Victorian era is famous for a lot of things and even though it was over a hundred years ago, we tend to forget that the Victorians gave us all our most important inventions that we have today…stuff like…the automobile…the telephone…wireless telecommunications…the elevator…the skyscraper…electric lighting…and the x-ray machine, an essential piece of kit in any modern hospital.

But the Victorians are famous for a lot more than just big fancy, world-changing, event-hogging inventions. The Victorian era was the dawn of the age of consumerism. With the Industrial Revolution, it had suddenly become much easier, than in previous times, to manufacture and sell consumer-goods. Prices were dropping and more people could buy more things with more money at their disposal. Not stuff that people needed like axes and chairs and shirts and cooking-pots, but also things that people wanted, to improve their lives and better their existences. Antiques shops, flea-markets, eBay and junk-shops are filled with the best examples of the small, everyday inventions and paraphernalia that the Victorian mind came up with to improve their lives and make themselves more comfortable, more presentable, more relaxed and more readily able to go out into their brave new world. While some of these inventions have stood the test of time, some have fallen by the wayside and end up as curiosities on television programs such as the “Antiques Roadshow”. The Victorians were fantastic inventors of all kinds of whimsical and interesting consumer-products, not all of which are as familiar to us today as they once were.

Here’s a list of some of the more interesting household devices and accessories that the Victorians came up with to better their lives and keep up appearances…

Butter-Pats

A block of solid butter, of the kind you buy at the supermarket that’s wrapped in paper and has a nice, rectangular shape to it, is called a pat, as in ‘a pat of butter’. Did you know that? They get that name because back in the Victorian era, if you lived in a rural location such as a village with nearby farms, or if you lived on a farm yourself and you made your own butter, you would form these neat little rectangular blocks of butter with a pair of specially-made wooden paddles, called ‘butter-pats’.

Collar-Boxes

Not many people would recognise a collar-box for what it is, if you showed them one today. But a hundred years ago, the collar-box was an essential bit of dressing-kit for any respectable and well-groomed man about town. In the Victorian-era, the shirt was seen as an undergarment that was rarely removed and was seen much like a pair of underwear – just as a necessity, and just like underwear, one which you never exposed in public. But if you had to, then fashion dictated that you only showed the best bits – the collar and cuffs. Because collars and cuffs were easily soiled with sweat-stains, collars were replacable and you could take them off to be cleaned when required. Spare collars for your shirt were kept in the collar-box in your bedroom or dressing-room. It wasn’t until well into the 20th century that the idea of shirts having permanent collars started making serious headway.

Tie Press

If there’s any women reading this who have husbands who have large collections of ties…or if there are any men reading this who have large collections of ties, you might want one of these things. They’re called tie-presses and they’re comprised of two flat pieces of wood held together with a series of wing-nuts (two pairs in the photograph above, although there are examples with only one pair). Tie-presses were used to keep a man’s ties nice and flat and smooth. They were clamped between the two pieces of wood to press out the wrinkles and creases that formed in neckties and bowties due to the crinkling of the fabric that came about from the tying of knots.

Sleeve Garters

Sleeve-garters are a uniquely Victorian invention. Today associated with ragtime pianists and barbershop quartets, sleeve-garters were used to adjust a man’s shirtsleeves in the days before fitted, off-the-rack shirts were available to the public at large. The man would put on his shirt, do up the cuffs and then slide on his sleeve-garters. Once he’d got the cuffs to the right length on his forearms and wrists, he’d let the elastic sleeve-garters snap into place to stop the sleeves from sliding down and letting the cuffs move out of their best positioning. Shirts today are better measured than the “one-size-fits-all” shirts of the Victorian-era though, so they’re a rather rare sight today…Unless you happen to like the music of Scott Joplin.

Hat brushes

My personal hat-brush

With hats (particularly the trilby and the fedora) coming back into fashion lately, I could hardly write this article without mentioning the traditional curved hat-brush. Back in the Victorian era, when men and women both wore hats on a regular, almost daily basis, owning a hat-brush was essential. They were used to brush the dust, soot, ash and general grit off of the rabbit or beaver-fur felt that made up traditional hats. Their distinctive curved shape helped the user to brush around the circular brim of his or her hat without creasing or bending the fabric and damaging the hat’s shape.

Men’s hairbrush-sets


My set of men’s hairbrushes, with ebony handles. Made by Kent Brushes of England (Est. 1777!)

Believe it or not, guys, there was a time when men used hairbrushes just as frequently as women. Although today most men use combs, blow-dryers or even just their fingers to smooth, dry, spike, tousle or otherwise arrange their scalpy shagpile, from the last quarter of the 1800s right up until the 1950s, most men used a matched set of hairbrushes such as the ones pictured above, to comb their hair. If you’ve ever seen those slicked-back men’s hairstyles such as those on 1930s film-stars or on the men in old family photographs and wondered how they did it – they used brushes like these (one in each hand) together with a dabbling of hair-oil or hair-cream, to vigorously brush back their hair and part it to give it that classic slicked-back hairstyle.

Antimacassars

If you’ve ever been on a commercial airliner, chances are, you’ve seen these things on the backs of every single seat in the passenger cabin, these white, almost papery sheets that cover the tops of the seatbacks. What are they and what is their purpose?


Empty macassar oil bottles

These things have been around since Victorian times and they’re called…antimacassars. They’re named after macassar oil, a hair-product that was popular back in the day (and which would’ve been applied to your hair with the brushes seen further up). Although macassar oil gives your hair a nice, slick, suave sheen and shine to it, the unfortunate downside is that…it is oil! And oil goes everywhere. The antimacassar was invented deliberately to protect chairbacks from the runoff from this popular (it lasted for over fifty years!) but messy hair-product. Although macassar oil might not be as popular today as once it was, the antimacassar has lived on for over a hundred years.

Clothes Valet

Not nearly as common today as they were back in the Victorian-era, clothes valets were once seen in almost every well-dressed man’s bedroom, and they remained there until the 1960s when people started dressing more casually and suits, sports-jackets, trousers, leather shoes, ties and cufflinks gave way to T-shirts, jeans and sneakers.

The clothes valet was used to neatly hang and store clothes that you wore on a regular basis. The bars at the bottom of the valet were used to rest your shoes on. The hanger at the back was used for your waistcoats and jackets and the top bar was used to hang trousers. The storage compartment at the top was used to keep keys, wallets, cufflinks, watches and other essential daily accessories.

Boot-Scrapers

See that small, metal rectangular thing sticking out of the porch between the pillars? Back in the Victorian-era, those things were as common as dirt and they were found on almost every doorstep in the world. Common as dirt because that’s what they were designed to remove. They are boot-scrapers, also called door-scrapers or shoe-scrapers. In the 1800s, streets were often filthy, filled with straw, rain, dirt, dust, ashes, horse-dung and household rubbish. Before entering a respectable establishment, business or private home, a man or woman was obliged to scrape the soles of his or her shoes across the blunted top edge of the boot-scraper to remove crud from the soles of their patent-leathers, to avoid tracking dirt inside. Some places still have these things bolted, cemented or dug into the doorsteps, porches and front yards all over the world. If you’ve ever wondered what they’re there for and if the homeowner thought that he’d put it there merely to trip you up as a practical joke…use it for it’s intended purpose and scrape the crap off your shoes before you go inside…the guy who put it there will thank you.

Shaving Scuttles

Shaving-scuttles (the thing behind the razor), are a uniquely Victorian invention. The scuttle was invented in the mid-1800s as an answer to men needing hot water for shaving but without having the modern benefit of running hot water in their bathrooms. To get a good shave, the scuttle was filled with boiling water hot from the stove in the kitchen before the shaving-brush was shoved into the spout of the scuttle to soak it. The brush was then removed and used to lather up the soap in the soap-dish on top of the scuttle. There are drainage-holes in the bottom of the soap-dish to allow any excess water to run back down into the lower chamber. These things are great for giving you nice, hot scented lather for shaving.

Barber-Surgeon’s Bowl

This rather neat little brass bowl looks all innocent and retro and quaint and unassuming, doesn’t it? It’s just as well that all that old-world charm exists, to cover up its far more grisly purpose.

That is a barber-surgeon’s bowl. Back in the old days, the barber-surgeon was the man responsible for the dual occupations of both barbering and surgery. That’s right. He would shave you and then amputate your leg. And he would use the same bowl to catch the shaving-lather…as he would…to catch the blood which came off from the stump after the amputation, or which would be drained from your body if he thought it necessary to carry out the age-old (but completely useless) task of bloodletting, where he would slice open a vein with a lancet and bleed you, collecting a measured amount of blood in the same bowl that he might just as well use for removing freshly-shaved lather from a gentleman’s chin and cheeks.

By the Victorian-era, you’ll be glad to know, the barber-surgeon was a thing of history…but they both still kept their bowls…and they both still used them…the barber for shaving and the surgeon for the collection of blood. The inward curve on the lip would go around your neck, if you were being shaved, so that the lather wouldn’t fall on your clothes. Or it would go against your arm or leg if you were having a limb amputated by the surgeon and he needed to catch the blood.

The Glove Compartment

Every car in the world…unless it’s a Peel P50…has a glove-compartment. This strange little cubbyhole, which always seems to be too small to hold anything that you would really need in a car, and which is always full of junk like instruction-manuals, letters, boxes of tissues and spare batteries, is a holdover from the earliest days of motoring, in the closing years of the Victorian era and the brief stint of the Edwardians at the start of the 20th century.

Back then, driving was a filthy and dangerous exercise. Roads were unpaved for the most part, and incredibly dusty. And even when they were paved, the roads could still be filthy and covered in all manner of filth and detritus. Not to mention that most cars of the era were open-topped affairs, susceptable to wind and rain. Keeping warm and dirt-free was essential. To aid in this, drivers wore purpose-made ‘driving-gloves’ to keep their hands clean and warm. These gloves were stored in a small box or compartment in the car so that they would always be nearby when the driver needed them.

The days of motorists needing driving-gloves are long gone, but the glovebox or glove-compartment remains.

Pen-Wipers

Cute little things, aren’t they? A sweet little bunny-wabbit and a cuddly little birdy-beak. Believe it or not, as adorable as these things are…they’re not toys. They’re called pen-wipers, and their rather unimaginative name directly reflects their purpose…they’re for wiping your pens on!

Until the very last decades of the Victorian-era, all writing was done with a dip-pen, a steel nib and an inkwell. Because ink was of the powdered, ‘two minute noodles’ variety, to which you just added water, it was common for dip-pens to accumulate a crusting of dried inky gunk on them after long periods of writing. This gunk would jam up the pen and impede the inkflow. To clear the nib of the dried ink and improve writing performance, men and women would keep little cloth ‘pen-wipers’ on their desks. These were simple little decorate mats with something in the middle (like the bunny or the bird’s head) to weigh it down and stop it sliding all over the desk. You wiped the pen-nib on the cloth, clearing the nib-channel before dipping it back in your inkwell and continuing with your correspondence or work.

 
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A Monarch’s Insanity: The Madness of George III

“It’ll be like mad King George the Third! I’ll be mad King George the Stammerer!” – Colin Firth; ‘The King’s Speech’ (2010)

Whatever the real King George VI thought about his stammer, Colin Firth was certainly right when he said that George the Sixth wasn’t the only English monarch in history who might have been thought of as ‘mad’ by his people. In fact, the crown for that award was given out over two hundred years ago, to another King George, whom this article is about; King George III.

Who Was George III?

He was born George William Fredrick on the fourth of June, 1738. He ascended to the British throne as King George III upon the death of his grandfather, the late George II, in October of 1760. By all accounts, the new monarch was a perfectly healthy and normal human-being and the first half of his reign ran relatively smoothly with no serious health complications of any kind. For George III, life was going well. He was happily married to his consort, Queen Charlotte; he had several children (fifteen in total!) and the British Empire was on the rise. During his reign, he saw the American and French Revolutions; he saw the wars they created and he saw the great battles that were fought against Napoleon. He was an avid student and was fascinated with science and technology. He gave his personal support to a struggling clock and watchmaker named John Harrison, whose invention, the marine chronometer, would go on to vastly improve accuracy of navigation at sea. He was the third ‘George’ of the Georgian-era which ran from 1714-1830.

George III was furious and devastated at the result of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), but eventually came to accept the United States as a new nation, despite his frustrations and disappointments regarding the outcome of the War. But the king’s dismay at the loss of the American Colonies was as nothing to the dismay of his friends, family and politicians when the king began to lose his mind…

The Madness of King George

George III is famous for many things, but he is most famous for the fits of “madness” that plagued his health towards the end of his life. Many kings and even queens, have gone mad over the centuries, but perhaps why George III is remembered so well in the history books, is because he lost his mind at a key point in history, with the fall of the French Monarchy and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the serious military threat that the new French leader posed to Great Britain. Because of the rumblings in Europe and danger of war with France (again!), George III’s incapacitation and a hopeful cure of this insanity, was of vital importance to the British government and the royal household.

George III’s illness started in October of 1788. Prior to this date everything had been just fine, but eventually, things began to go wrong. The king’s personal physician suspected something was up when “Farmer George” as his subjects affectionately called him, due to the monarch’s love of nature, the outdoors and of the occupation of farming, tried to plant a steak! He believed that meat grew from trees and that by planting a nice T-bone in the garden, he might perhaps grow a new breed of hotdog tree (or something like that). The royal physician thought this rather odd. He didn’t do anything about it, but it certainly made him pay closer attention to the king.

The first real sign of George’s madness happened when his servants happened upon him in the grounds of Windsor Castle…shaking hands with a tree…whom the king believed was the person of King Frederick the Great of the Prussian Empire! Apart from the fact that Frederick the Great never had bark, branches or leaves on his person…there was also the rather inconvenient fact that by 1788…Frederick the Great had been dead for two years! It was now that royal physicians really began to worry!

George III gradually grew worse. He suffered from a variety of complaints ranging from severe stomach-cramps and general abdominal pain, joint-and-muscle pain, anxiety-attacks, depression and hallucinations (which probably explains the royal tree and the steak-planting). He would have great discomfort in sleeping and suffered from seizures and fits that were so bad that his doctors were compelled to strap the king into a chair to prevent him from harming himself or others! As the year 1788 progressed into October and November, the king grew more and more unmanagable and erratic and there were talks of creating a regency if the king was unable to rule effectively.

Treating the King

Medicine in the 18th century was rudimentary at best. While physicians in the 1780s knew how to treat injuries and various illnesses with medicines of mild effectiveness, they had absolutely no understanding of mental afflictions. There was no distinction between one mental condition to another and there was no real way of knowing how to treat mental illness and certainly no way of curing it! George III’s condition was simply labelled “Madness”.

In the truest sense of the word, the king was given the full Georgian medical treatment for “Madness”, a series of procedures that were far from pleasant. It would not be until the mid-1800s that doctors finally threw out the millenia-old theory of ‘Humorism’, that the human body supposedly contained four humors or liquids: Black and Yellow Bile, Phlegm and Blood. In the 1780s however, this medical theory was still in full swing. And it was with this misguided knowledge that the doctors attempted to treat the king.

The usual treatments included such procedures as bloodletting, blistering, sweating, restraints and scary cocktails and potions designed to treat the king’s various symptoms, all to no effect. Something drastic had to be done.

Enter Dr. Francis Willis.

Francis Willis was a qualified physician for the day and he was recommended as the best person in all England to treat the ailing king. A friend of Queen Charlotte mentioned that Dr. Willis had successfully cured her mother and that his methods appeared effective and creditable. Desperate to try anything, the royal physicians backed down and gave Willis free access to the king.

Willis’s treatments were both familiar and unfamiliar to the doctors of the day. He employed many of the usual methods of dealing with mental illness that other 18th Century doctors were familiar with, such as restraints and blistering, but instead of acting blindly, Willis also tried to counsel and provide therapy for his unfortunate patients. Due to the sheer hopelessness of it, perhaps, most physicians probably failed to remember that their patients were human and didn’t bother trying to communicate with people suffering from mental illnesses. Willis spent time with the king, talking him through things, trying to understand what was going on.

It was clear to Willis at least, that if the king was mad and out of control, then it was someone’s duty to bring the king back UNDER control…by force if need be. And if the royal physicians weren’t willing to do it due to their patient’s status and title, then he would. Apart from regimens of therapy, restraints, control, exercise and plenty of exposure to fresh air and regular labour, Willis also tried to make it clear to his patients that they themselves had to make an effort to fight against their demons.

Meanwhile, all the other doctors just laughed. They thought that Willis himself was probably only just slightly less mad than his patient and that his treatments couldn’t possibly work and that he was wasting his time and that he should go and do something else!…Despite the fact that Willis had significant success in treating mental illness…something that none of the royal physicians could claim…and despite the fact that Dr. Willis’s treatments did produce results. As indeed they did with the king.

By 1789, the king’s madness had subsided. The regency had not been declared and he was now able to resume his normal royal duties, aided back to health by the determined and persistent Dr. Willis who would never give up. Willis’s ability to cure the king made him a national celebrity and he made a name for himself as a pioneer of mental health treatment. For a while…things seemed alright.

But for George III, his madness was not over. Between 1789-1810, he would have another five episodes of “madness”. Unfortunately, Francis Willis died in 1807 at the respectable and ripe age of 89, but he was succeeded in his work by his two sons, Drs. John and Robert Willis. Familiar with their father’s methods, these brother physicians continued to monitor the king and treat him for his occasional reccurences of insanity for the next twenty years. As much as he probably appreciated their efforts, it’s not surprising that the king grew to hate the sight of Dr. Willis and the sight of his sons. He refused their treatments despite their effectiveness and he barred them from his presence. Despite this resistence, Queen Charlotte was insistent that the doctors ignore her husband’s ravings and to continue treating him since it was clear to her that only constant monitoring and treatment would drive away his madness, and this persistence did seem to work. Although George III was not free of his madness, with help, he was at least able to control it and it seemed that life could go on as normal.

Or so they thought.

In 1810, the king’s madness returned, and this time, it came back with a vengeance. Not even the determination and experience of the Willis brothers could save him, and George III was eventually deposed as king a year later. Wholly unable to rule despite the best efforts of the Willises and other doctors, George III was declared incurably insane and finally, in 1811, a regency was declared, with his son, the future King George IV, taking the reins of monarchy and government.

The End of George III

George’s final descent into complete madness destroyed his family. In 1811, his first son was declared Prince Regent. George’s devoted and loving wife, Queen Charlotte, was devastated by the news of her husband’s return to insanity and despite the fact that they did no good at all, she would visit her husband regularly in the room that he would eventually be taken to, in Windsor Castle. Again, George’s insanity came in waves, but try as they might, it was impossible to pull him out. He was in too deep by now. As the years went on, he eventually went blind and was lost to the world. He wasn’t even informed of his wife’s death in 1818. In the end, George III would die alone and insane at the age of 81, in 1820.

Diagnosing the King

It is widely believed the George III suffered from recurrent and eventually, permanent porphyria. In layman’s terms, porphyria is a genetic nervous disease that effects the brain and nervous system. Sufferers of Porphyria experience a range of discomforts, ranging from vomiting to stomach-pains, sensitive skin, diahrrea, purple or red urine, seizures and muscle-weakness. The most famous symptoms of porphyria, however, are severe mental disturbances. Sufferers of severe porphyria are afflicted with depression, paranoia, panic-attacks and hallucinations. It is possible that the king’s porphyria was worsened by the ingestion of arsenic, a strong poison that was a common ingredient in cosmetics and even some medicines of the 1700s.