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.

Sweeney Todd is one of the most famous people in the world, his legendary status is up there with Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper and George W. Bush. This demonic, insane barber of Victorian-era London who loved slitting the throats of his victims with a straight-razor and sending them sliding down through a trapdoor into the basement of the pie-shop below, run by his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, has been famous for over a hundred years as one of the most bloodthirsty serial-killers in the world.

But did he ever exist?

The recent Johnny Depp film of a couple of years back, entitled “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” was an amazing success, but was any of the story ever based on fact? Or is it just the concoction of a lively and grusome imagination? This article will explore the world of Todd, the truths, the facts, the falsehoods and lies.

Sweeney Todd: The Man

Sweeney Todd, the insane barber. A real person or a figment of imagination?

Sorry to disappoint the more bloodthirsty readers out there, but Sweeney Todd was not a real person. As far as reliable historical records and research have uncovered, a man named Sweeney Todd never existed. Possibilities that Todd was in fact based on a real serial-killer by a different name are equally unlikely. Examinations of legal records from courthouses such as the Old Bailey in London have concluded that Todd was little more than a Victorian-era urban legend. If Todd was, or was based on a real person, pieces of evidence to support this are either few and far between and of questionable repute, or never existed at all.

Sweeney Todd: The Myth

If Sweeney Todd never existed, either as a person himself, or as an alias for another person, then how did he come about?

Sweeney Todd was ‘born’ in 1846. He was the subject of a short story called “The String of Pearls”, which was published as a ‘penny dreadful’ during the early Victorian-era. Penny dreadfuls were exactly what they sounded like – cheap, short stories or novels which were just…dreadful…to read. These short stories were printed on news-rag and their plots were usually dark, lurid, erotic and morbid…all the things that respectable publishing-houses of the time refused to run through their printing-presses.

Sweeney Todd’s method of killing was to slit his victims in a specially-constructed barber’s chair. By pulling a lever or pressing a foot-pedal with his shoe, Todd could make the chair tilt over, tipping his victims down a trapdoor into a basement below. The drop would make the victims break their necks. After they were dead, the bodies were then processed into meat pies, to be sold by Todd’s partner-in-crime, Mrs. Lovett, in her pie-shop, in the most hardcore example of food-adulteration in the world.

Over the next century and a half, the public lapped up Sweeney Todd. There plays made about him, books written about him and at least two films with him as the main character. Although Todd himself never existed, I think one reason why the story lasted so long and was so popular among the Victorians was because it concentrated on elements of daily life that would have been very familiar to men reading the ‘Todd’ stories back in the 1840s and 50s.

Elements of Sweeney’s Legend

Although Sweeney Todd wasn’t real, even though he was only a murderer on ink and paper, the fear and horror he generated and continues to generate to this day, is due mostly to mankind’s combined fears of two things, which Todd did much to excacerbate: The straight-razor and food-adulteration. Almost singlehandedly, Todd turned what was once a finely-crafted blade into a cold, hard killing-utensil, and made all our fears of “mystery meat” a reality, so to speak. But what was the reality of these things back in Victorian times? Did people really turn people into pies and serve them for lunch?

Shaving with a Straight Razor

If Sweeney Todd did one thing at all, he made the straight-razor the fearsome, lethal, morbid and terrifying throat-slitting, blood-gushing murder-utensil that we know it for today, capable of ending life in a second with nothing more than a quick draw across the flesh. Now people are just terrified of these things, aren’t they? Show someone a gun and they start looking all over it, touching it, staring at it, examining it minutely. Show someone a straight-razor and they’ll hand over their wallets so fast they’d get leather-burn on their fingers. Popular culture and Sweeney Todd has ingrained in mankind that straight-razors are horrific, dangerous knives which only highly skilled professionals or insane barbers would ever dare apply to their faces. But how much of all this whazzoolally is actually fact?

Straight-razors are extremely sharp, there’s no doubt about that. They would be useless for their intended purpose (uh…shaving, folks. Don’t forget, they are razors!) if they were not, but the chances of actually cutting yourself with a straight-razor, or having someone else cut you with a straight-razor, if it was used as a razor, are actually rather minimal, provided of course that the razor is ready for shaving. The reason for this is because the angle of the blade required to cut hair and the sheer lack of pressure applied to the blade-edge would make slitting your throat highly unlikely. Furthermore, the slick, lubricated surface of prepared, lathered skin means that the open blade slides across your skin’s lubricated surface, it doesn’t scrape across dry skin, cutting into it. Straight-razors are used in smooth, sweeping vertical strokes, edge-leading, spine-following, not in side-to-side slitting, slashing horizontal movements! With enough practice, a steady hand and a sufficiently honed and stropped blade, you can soon gain enough proficiency to shave to perfection with a straight-razor. It’s not that hard.

Today, few people shave with a straight-razor…which is a pity, because in today’s waste-conscious, green-worrying world, a straight-razor is the ultimate in long-lasting bathroom accessories. You sharpen it, strop it, shave with it and then just continue honing and stropping it and shaving with it throughout the rest of your life, never having to buy another razor ever again. Apart from looking amazingly cool, shaving with a straight-razor saves you a lot of money, believe me!

Sweeney Todd’s seven-piece straight-razor set from the movie “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”. While most straight-razors are sold on their own, if you can afford it, you could…and still can…buy a seven-piece razor-set, with a different blade for each day of the week

Of course, there were people back in the Victorian-era who couldn’t shave themselves, for various reasons. Maybe they didn’t own a razor, or they didn’t have the skills necessary to shave themselves. This was where the barber came in. The unshaven man would visit the barber, who was (and still is) the only professional man qualified to give anothe person a shave. Barbers used to be trained in the art of shaving and were expected to be able to give smooth, quick, bloodless shaves as part of their training. The barber would prepare the man’s face by softening it with hot water and a towel, brush on the lathered shaving-soap and then start the steady and methodic task of shaving. Lying back defenselessly in a barber’s chair while a man stood over you with nothing less than three-and-a-half inches of steely, ice-cold metallic death in his hands was probably enough to scare anyone, and it was this fear that Sweeney Todd preyed on, and to this day, many people are terrified to shave with straight-razors, even though they’re actually no more dangerous than a cartridge-razor.

Food Adulteration in Victorian England

The other big fear that Sweeney Todd generated was that of food adulteration. Food-adulteration is the process of making food out of unsuitable or substandard products. Although we like to think that food back in the old days was fresh-baked, fresh-picked, fresh-harvested and free from preservatives, pesticides and additives, colours and all that stuff…the truth was significantly more different.

Until the late 19th century, food-adulteration and contamination was rife in Victorian-era England. Almost anything was used to make anything else and anything else was advertised as anything the customer wished it to be. If the customer wanted to believe it was ice-cream…it was ice-cream…not paint, sugar, milk, cream and ice blended to look like ice-cream (which it could very well have been!).

One of the key elements of the Sweeney Todd legend is that his victims were processed and turned into meat pies. Although I’ve found no records or information that Victorians ever served up cannibalistic culinary creations such as this, what is known for sure and certain is that the Victorians were notorious for serving contaminated food. There were precious few health-laws in the 19th century, and there were even fewer laws governing food and drink. Because of this, unscrupulous vendors could sell absolutely horrific grub to the public with the public being none the wiser. It was estimated that in the mid-1800s, over half the food sold by food-hawkers in London was contaminated. How contaminated?

Toffee sold to children could contain lice, fleas, hair and sawdust.
Tea-leaves could be recycled, dried, redarkened with ink and resold as “fresh” tea.
Mustard could contain lead.
Chocolate could contain mercury.
Milk was watered down, and then rewhitened with chalk.
Cheese that was mouldy could be covered with paint to make it look fresh.
Butter, gin and bread all had varying amounts of copper added to it, to give it that fresh, yellow appearance.
Chalk was also added to bread to whiten it, due to the high price of flour.
Beer was watered-down with water or even vitriol! What is vitriol you ask? Consult your highschool science-teacher. ‘Vitriol’ (also called ‘Oil of Vitriol’) was a Victorian English term for the compound known today as…sulphuric acid! Eugh!

These, and hundreds of other atrocities far too numerous to mention here, were all commonplace in Victorian England and would have been horrors that Victorians who were familiar with the stories of Sweeney Todd, would become increasingly aware of as the years rolled by. The first act of British parliament to try and control food-adulteration came out in 1860. It wasn’t very strongly enforced though, and was largely ignored by those whose job it was to uphold the law. It wasn’t until 1875 and the passage of the ‘Sale of Food & Drugs’ act that proper laws regarding hygeine of food and drink were brought into permanent and practical effect.

I’ll be honest…I’m not a fan of wristwatches. Never have been, am not now, and never will be. I find them uncomfortable, irritating, pedestrian and boring. Plus, I can never find a dial that I like. I’m a simple person and I hate trying to read a watch-dial that has tiny numbers, that has no numbers, or that has a million other things on it, like day, date, month, moonphase, stopwatch, heartrate-monitor and an inbuilt, nuclear-holocaust-grade gieger-counter.

Unfortunately these days, most watches seem to come in one of those three categories. To add to this, I do a lot of things with my hands: Writing, typing, playing the piano and handling heavy stuff. And when I’m doing stuff like that, a wristwatch just gets in the way. I used to have a really bad habit (according to some), of removing my wristwatch all the time and putting it into my pocket whenever I used it, and only taking it out when I wanted to tell the time. Well, after a few years of this, I gave up and decided that for my 21st birthday a few years ago, I’d buy myself a pocket-watch.

I love pocket-watches. Call me kooky and weird if you must, but I do. They’re a classic piece of men’s jewellery which, sadly, has been out of fashion for the best part of the last fifty or sixty years. The last commercially-produced pocket watches were made in the 1970s, and by that, I mean you found them in shop-windows or in magazines. These days? Not on your life.

I wear a pocket-watch on a daily basis. It’s easy to read, it’s classy, I don’t have some ugly manacle on my wrist all the time…and believe me, the pocket-watch is an amazing conversation-starter!

On watch forums, on history forums and just generally online, I’ve heard of people who want to buy pocket watches, either to wear, or to practice watchmaking on, or to give as a present to a friend or relation. Maybe they want to establish a sort of classic dress-style and want the watch to complete their look. Maybe they’re steampunkists looking for that finishing touch to their outfit. But then they start wondering: “Where the hell do I find a pocket-watch?”

The biggest problem with pocket watches is that, since they’re so rarely worn these days, finding one can be a challenge. This is my guide to shopping for a good-quality antique, vintage or hell, even a modern pocket watch! So let’s get to it. Hopefully, you’ll find it helpful.

Where to Look?

This is probably the hardest thing. Where do you start looking? The days where you could mail-order a pocket-watch from a magazine or buy one in a regular shop are long gone. But there are still places you can go to find a pocket watch. Here they are:

Antiques Shops.

Duuuuuh! Pocket-watches in antiques shops are usually good quality, but keep in mind that these watches are being sold by professional antiques dealers. Their prices could be scarily expensive. And that’s without spending the money to get the watch serviced, as well! Unless you’ve got money to burn, it’s best to avoid these places.

Watch Shops.

Another rather obvious place. Some watchmakers’ shops do sell pocket-watches. Either modern ones or vintage and antique pocket-watches that they’ve bought, serviced and want to resell, or watches that people have sold or donated to them. Buying a pocket-watch from a watchmaker or a watch-shop is still going to be expensive, but you will at least have the peace-of-mind in knowing that you’re dealing with a professional who not only knows his stuff (hopefully!) but that you’re also buyinig a pocket-watch that has already been serviced, saving you a nice bit of money.

Flea-markets and watch-shows.

Flea-markets, bric-a-brac markets, watch-shows, junk-shops, thrift-shops and other dealers of second-hand junk are another nice place to look for pocket watches, however, these places can be fraught with various dangers, such as the quality of the timepiece, the knowledge of the seller, and of course…the fact that the watch is second-hand, being sold outside of a professional environment.

You might get amazingly lucky and buy a good-quality pocket-watch secondhand. But you still have to pay to get the watch serviced. You wouldn’t buy a car without having it serviced before driving it, would you? No. Neither should do that with a pocket-watch. They’re mechanical devices that require care and attention. If you do find a nice pocket-watch, then you have to deal with the seller. If the seller is ignorant of the quality of the watch, you could probably knock the price down pretty substantially before buying it, or, if the seller knows *exactly* what he’s selling, you might not get anywhere. The last factor is that you’re buying the watch second-hand outside of a professional environment. What do I mean by this?

By this, I mean that the watch most likely has not been serviced. Servicing means that the watch has been taken to a watchmaker, it has been examined, disassembled, examined, cleaned, examined, lubricated, reassembled, examined, timed for accuracy and then put back together into its complete state again. When buying any pocket-watch second-hand, remember that you will need to have it serviced and that you should factor at least $200 into the service-cost. So if you buy a watch for $100, it’ll cost about $300 (or more, depending on what needs to be done) to get the watch to a satisfactory, working condition.

Buying online.

Some watch-collectors or watchmakers or watch-sellers love selling stuff on eBay, and this can be a very nice place to look for watches, provided that you know what you’re looking for. As pocket-watches can be expensive, people aren’t likely to try and cheat you out of money, because if you buy a dud from them, they know that they’re probably never going to hear the end of it from you. Stick to online shops or sellers with high reputations.

Apart from eBay, there are also plenty of watch-sites online that sell new or used pocket-watches. These are also excellent places to search for pocket-watches, as each watch-listing will usually include all the important details about the watch’s manufacture, quality, age and service-history. Prices might be a bit high, so keep that in mind.

What to Look For?

Now you know where to look, the next thing to know is what to look for. Don’t forget that pocket watches have been around for about five hundred years. There were literally hundreds, if not thousands of watchmakers, making everything from the sensible, to the sensational, to the senseless! Making…er…sense…of all these watches and the varying qualities is important, so that you know what to look for.

Wanting to buy a pocket-watch is only half the battle. Knowing what makes quality is the other half. As most pocket-watches these days are ones that you’ll be buying second-hand, keep an eye on the following:

Brand/Company/Watchmaker

Pocket-watches have been around for centuries. There are millions of pocket-watches out there made by thousands of watchmakers. How do you know what’s good quailty? A general rule of thumb is: Never buy a pocket-watch if you can’t type the name of the watch-company or watchmaker into a Google Search, and find information on it. If nobody’s bothered to write about this company or watchmaker and post it online, there’s probably a damn good reason. The two main reasons are: Rarity (which means if your watch breaks, you can’t find parts for it!) or poor quality (which means you’re wasting money having it serviced!).

Stick to well-known watchmakers. Companies such as: Waltham, Hamilton, Elgin, South Bend, Rockford, Illinois, Patek-Philippe (if you can afford it!), Breuget (again, if you can afford it!), Tissot, Ball and Omega, to name just a few. All these companies made watches of good quality which are worth looking at.

General Condition

Never…ever…buy a broken pocket-watch. Buying a nonfunctioning watch is fine, but not a broken one. What’s the difference?

A ‘nonfunctioning’ watch is a watch which is in perfect mechanical condition. It just won’t run. This can be remedied by a trip to the watchmaker. Once it’s cleaned and reassembled, it should work wonderfully! So if you find a watch that’s in good condition but which doesn’t run, buy it and send it to the watchmaker.

A broken watch is…a broken watch. One with damaged components, one with missing components (even worse!) or one which is being sold ‘for parts’. If you’re unlucky enough to buy a broken watch, depending on the brand of watch, it may be possible to get the watch fixed and working, but this could mean a higher servicing-bill. Keep that in mind.

The next thing to look for in buying a watch is general condition…

Case and Caseback

In the strictest term, a ‘watch’ is the movement, the mechanics inside the case. The case around the watch is just something to keep it safe. Watch-cases are made up of various components:

– Bow. (Pronounced like ‘throw’). The bow is the round metal ring or loop on the top of the watch-case. This is where you clip your watch-chain to. A good bow should be centered properly and not too loose or likely to part company with the case.

– Bezel. The bezel is the metal securing-ring around the crystal. A nice bezel should be free from brassing, scratches and dents.

– Crystal. The crystal (some people like to call them the ‘glass’) is the circle of glass, plastic or crystal over the watch-dial. Crystals should be free from scratches, chips and cracks.

– Caseback. The caseback is the back of the case (duh!). Some casebacks have small cartouches or blank, empty spots on them. These were there for people to engrave their monograms or initials on. A good caseback should be free from scratches, dents and brassing.

– Crown. The crown is the round, corrugated knob at the top of the watch, above the pendant and below the bow. The crown is used to wind the watch, and in most cases, set it to the right time. A crown shouldn’t be too loose and wobbly. It should turn smoothly and evenly when you wind the watch and it should pop out smoothly and click back down smoothly when you set the time.

Dial

Watch-dials should be clean and easy to read, without any hairline cracks or chips or faded lettering and markings. A small note: A hairline crack does NOT damage the whole integrity of the dial: Dials were placed on metal backing-plates which secured them to the watch-movement, so a crack on the dial doesn’t mean that it’s going to fall to pieces.

Hands

A pocket-watch typically has three hands. Hour, Minute and Second. In most pocket-watches, the second-hand is a tiny thing which spins around the ‘seconds subdial’, which is a smaller, inset dial at the bottom of the watch, at the six o’clock point. Make sure that all the hands match and that they’re proportionate to the size of the watch.

Movement

The ‘movement’ is the mechanics inside the watch. Check for cracks, rust, missing screws, wobbly bits that shouldn’t be, and stationary bits that shouldn’t be. Most importantly of all, check the balance. The balance is the the heart of the watch. It’s the bit that swings back and forth, making the watch go ‘tick-tock’. Balances can be pretty delicate, so don’t touch it, just look at it. Check to see that the balance-spring (more commonly called a ‘hairspring’) is perfectly coiled. If it’s tangled up or if it’s off-center, that will need to be looked at by a watchmaker.

While you’re looking at the movement, search for the following features…

If you’re buying an American-made vintage or antique pocket-watch, look for the serial-number. The serial-number on the movement can tell you how old the watch is, how many of this model were made and how long they were made for. Also look for words like “Jewels” and “Adjusted”. Good quality pocket-watches always had jewels in them. These are typically rubies or sapphires which are used as bearings to cut down on friction. Cutting down on friction means that the watch runs smoother and keeps better time. Aim to buy a watch with at least seven jewels. The traditional jewel-counts for quality pocket watches started at seven, and then went up to nine, eleven, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one and lastly, twenty-three jewels. A seven-jewel watch will give you decent timekeeping. A watch with more jewels should give you better timekeeping, but don’t expect quartz-watch accuracy…that’s not going to happen. Ever.

If you find the word ‘adjusted’ inside your watch, you might find extra words like “Adjusted to *X* positions”.

There are eight possible ‘adjustments’ that can be made to a watch. Adjustments for position (there are six of these) meant that the watch was expected to keep accurate time, no matter how you held the watch: upside down, right side up, flat on a table, flipped upside down on a table, on a stand on its side…anything. Then, there are two other adjustments: Isochronism and Temperature.

Isochronism (say that six times fast! Pronounced ‘eye-sock-row-nism’) is the ability of the watch to keep time regardless of the mainspring’s level of tension. All watches should be adjusted for this. If you find ‘Temperature’ engraved on the watch-movement, it means that the watch has been adjusted to keep time in extremes of temperature: Freezing cold and boiling heat (from about 0 degrees celsius to about 45 degrees, or 32 degrees farenheit and about 115 degrees).

Buying a highly jewelled, adjusted watch in good condition will assure you of good timekeeping once it’s been serviced by a professional. Don’t bother buying a mechanical pocket-watch without at least seven jewels in it…it’s not worth it. Watches like that were designed to be used until they broke, after which, they were meant to be thrown out. Don’t waste your money on that.

Buying your Watch

Now you know where to look, and what to look for. Antiques shops, watch-shops, flea-markets, eBay, online shops. What to check for on a good quality watch. Now you want to buy a watch. What do you do?

How much does a pocket-watch cost? This is probably the first thing you’re asking.

That really depends. I could go out right now and buy a mechanical pocket watch made in China for $15 (and yes, I have actually done that, a long time ago). But that $10 Chinese-made piece of junk isn’t going to last you any, and it’s not gonna look nice when you wear it. So how much should you expect to pay for a quality watch?

Modern Pocket-Watches

Modern pocket-watches are usually quartz pocket watches with plated watch-cases. A simple quartz pocket-watch can be had for about $10. It’ll last forever, it’s easy to maintain, and…that’s it. But when most people think about pocket watches, they imagine those old-timey wind-up things that you see in old movies. How much does one of those cost?

Antique & Vintage Mechanical Pocket-Watches

A word of warning: When buying mechanical pocket watches, newer is not always better. A modern, good-quality mechanical pocket-watch might be a nice thing to buy, and some of them are indeed great quality and worth the money, but remember that these days, most pocket watches are manufactured as showpieces and decoration…not as practical timepieces.

If you want a mechanical pocket-watch, it’s better to buy a vintage or antique watch from a famous watch-company. Why? Because back when these watches were made, quality-control, testing and general manufacturing standards were a LOT higher. This is because they had to be…they were the only watches around, so they had to be good quality. Unlike today when everything is a throwaway affair, back then, you bought a pocket-watch to last you your whole life, so quality was much better.

A watch like that can be had for anywhere from a hundred dollars (not including servicing) to around $500 or more, depending on quality, case-metal, reputation of the maker and of course, the functionality of the watch. Solid gold and silver watches are very hard to buy cheap. Unscrupulous people love buying watches like this…and they rip out the movement…they take off the crystal, they remove the dial…and they melt the watch-case down for scrap. Because of this, solid-gold watches or solid silver watches are getting increasingly expensive. Unless you have a lot of money, forget about owning one of those. Whatever you pay for your pocket-watch, be it $100 or $1,000, always remember to factor in another $250 for the servicing that the watch will have to undergo before you can use it!

Watch-Cases

If you want a gold watch, the best thing to go for is a gold-filled watch. Vintage and antique gold-filled watches are more common, they cost less and they looked just as nice. But just to clarify: Gold-filling is NOT gold-plating.

The Difference?

Gold-filling is done by getting two sheets of gold and sandwiching them either side of a base-metal (brass) and welding them together nice and solid. This creates the appearance of solid gold without the heart-attack-inducing price-tag. Because it was cheaper to produce but just as pretty, most watch-case companies made cases like this. They lasted a long time and they looked pretty. When checking a case for gold-content, gold-filled cases are usually marked “Gold filled” or “Guaranteed to wear for 5/10/20/25 years”. The longer the case is guaranteed to ‘wear’ or last for, the better the gold-filling and the better the quality. Gold-filled cases were usually 14kt, but this can vary.

Gold-plating is done by immersing a base-metal watch-case (made of brass) into a solution and electroplating it with gold. This is also cheaper and gives the appearance of gold. But unlike gold-filling, which will last for decades, you’d be lucky if gold-plating lasts a year. The gold-plating is often so thin (only a few microns) that enough rubbing and handling of the watch-case will soon rub all the gold right off. On the other hand, it takes decades of heavy use to do the same thing to a gold-filled case.

What if you want a silver watch-case instead? If you can’t afford real, sterling or coin-silver, then you’ll have to settle for silver-plate, or you could do the next step down and buy a watch with a nickel case. Nickel might sound cheap, but it can give a nice, silvery look to a watch at a fraction of the price.

Another thing you should consider is the case-style that you want. This won’t be too hard, there are only two. The first case-style is the ‘open-face case’. This means that you have the case and the bezel and the crystal and the dial, with the crown at 12 o’clock. The other case-style is the ‘hunter-case’. A hunter-case pocket-watch is one with a lid that closes over the watch-dial. This can be a useful feature for some people, who want to prevent the watch-crystal from getting scratched, cracked or chipped. A hunter-case watch is opened by pressing down on the crown, which releases a spring-loaded catch inside the watch-case to open the lid. Closing a hunter-case watch should be done by pressing down on the crown, closing the lid and then releasing the crown to keep it shut. Just snapping the case-lid shut can damage the catch and the metal on the edge of the case.

Setting-Mechanism

On most pocket-watches these days, setting the time is pretty easy. You pull out the crown, turn the hands and then pop the crown back down. Vintage pocket-watches, however, had about four ways to set the time. Knowing which one of these applies to your new antique or vintage pocket watch is important…doing it wrong could mean your watch has to go back to the watchmaker!

– Key-set.

Key-set watches are the oldest of the oldest pocket watches. These watches were set by using the watch’s winding-and-setting key. Watches like these were obsolete by the second half of the 19th century, though.

– Pendant/Crown-set.

The most common kind. You pull out the crown and turn it to set the hands and then push it back in. If your watch-crown doesn’t pop up neatly when you tug on it to set the time, don’t force it! It could be one of the following…

– Lever-set.

A lever-set watch (which was mandatory for ALL railroad-quality pocket-watches) works by unscrewing the bezel, pulling out the small, metallic setting-lever and turning the crown to set the time. Once the correct time is set, the lever is pushed back in and the bezel is screwed back on.

– Pin-set.

Pin-set watches are similar to lever-set watches, only, instead of pulling something out, you push something in. In this case, the setting-pin. On watches like this, the setting-pin is located near the watch-bow. You press down the pin and that allows you to turn the crown to set the hands. Once the hands are set, you release the pin and let the watch run.

Watch-Chains

Pocket-watches are rarely sold with their necessary watch-chains. Normally, you’re going to have to buy them seperately. A pocket-watch must be worn with its chain. Not only does it look nicer, it’s also a security feature. The chain catches the watch and prevents it from becoming abstract art on the pavement, if it should fall out of your pocket. The annoying thing about watch-chains is that they can be even MORE expensive than the watches themselves!

Solid gold watch-chains cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars. The cheapest I’ve found is $400. On the other hand, you can get a nice gold-filled chain for a fraction of that price, and a nice, polished brass watch-chain for even less! My brass Albert watch-chain cost all of $20 and it looks great!

When buying a chain, you want to make sure that it’s got a decent length (at least 10-14 inches long), that it’s strong and that the swivel-clips work. The clip is, after all, what holds the watch to the chain, so examining its integrity is vital.

There are four main types of watch-chains around today: Albert, Double Albert, ring-clip and belt-clip.

The Albert and Double Albert (named for His Royal Highness, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria) are the most iconic of watch-chains. They feature a swivel T-bar at the end of the chain and were designed to be worn with jackets and waistcoats.

The ring-clip chain was designed to be worn with a pair of trousers. You put the watch into your watch-pocket and clipped the chain to your belt-loop.

A pocket-watch with a ring-clip chain

The belt-clip chain was also meant to be worn with trousers, where you put your watch into your watch-pocket and clipped the chain to your belt.

Wearing your Pocket-Watch

This is probably one of the most confusing things about pocket-watches in the 21st century. You’ve bought a nice, good-quality pocket watch. A 1902 Ball railroad watch with 21 jewels, eight adjustments and a pretty, gold-filled case and a nice, long watch-chain. Only…now…you don’t know what to do with it.

If you have absolutely no desire to actually wear your pocket watch, then another thing you can do with it is buy a pocket-watch stand. They’re cheap and easy to get online and you can put your watch (with the chain) onto your stand and use it as a clock on your desk or your dressing-table! That way, you can use it without using it…if that makes sense.

However, if you actually bought your watch and chain to wear it, but don’t know how…read on.

Now, a rather irrelevant piece of information is that I work as a volunteer in a charity shop. While helping out a customer there last week, she commented on my watch-chain and wondered what was on the end of it. I showed her, and this sparked a conversation between her and her friends about the pocket-watches that their fathers and grandfathers used to wear. She then asked me if you HAD to have a waistcoat (which is what I was wearing at the time) to wear a pocket watch?

The answer is ‘no’. I’ve been wearing a pocket-watch for the past two years, but I only bought a waistcoat a few months ago. Sadly, there is a HUGE misconception that you MUST own a three-piece suit, or at least a waistcoat, to wear a pocket-watch, and this tends to put people off. Maybe they don’t have a suit or a waistcoat, maybe they don’t want to wear it, but they feel that they have to. This simply isn’t true. Granted, the three-piece suit isn’t as prevelant today as it was sixty or seventy years ago, but you can still wear a pocket watch with modern dress. You just have to be creative.

Pocket-watches can be worn in a variety of ways; wearing one with a waistcoat is simply the most common one. There are a few ways you can wear a pocket watch, and here they are:

Suit-jacket breast-pocket.

Most suit-jackets or suit-coats will have a buttonhole in the left lapel. That’s not just there to look weird or to put a flower into…it’s also where you put your watch-chain! Inserting the T-bar of an Albert-chain into the buttonhole from the front will keep the T-bar out of sight and keep the chain securely in-place. Your watch and the rest of your chain sits snugly in the jacket’s breast-pocket. You can, if you like, hang the rest of your chain out of your pocket, if you don’t want it cluttering up your breast-pocket and making it look too bulky.

Trousers watch-pocket.

Not many people are aware of this, but often when you buy trousers or jeans, they come with enigmatic little pockets, usually on the right side, near the hip. Useless for keys, mobile-phones, coins and condoms, these were actually added to jeans to serve as…you guessed it…watch-pockets!

Due to the “designer” fad of jeans at the moment, not all fifth-pockets will accomadate a pocket-watch, but most of the traditionally-styled jeans should present no problem at all. Just slip your pocket-watch into your trousers or jeans watch-pocket and then clip your ring-clip chain to the nearest convenient belt-loop, or slide your belt-clip chain over your belt. This latter chain is best clipped onto the belt from behind the belt, instead of in front, so that the clip doesn’t snap off the belt accidently when you pull on it. You may notice that the watch will sit in the pocket rather snugly – this is because you’re not meant to shove your fingers in there. Instead, pull on the watch-chain to slide the watch out instead.

Waistcoat pocket.

Last but not least, the classic way: Wearing a pocket-watch with a waistcoat. To do this, you’ll need an Albert or Double-Albert chain. A pocket-watch can be worn with a double or single-breasted waistcoat and in any one of the two (or four) pockets. It’s really a matter of personal choice. Which-ever pocket is selected, the chain should be inserted into a buttonhole so that the top of the chain is in line with the top of the watch-pocket.

Caring for your Pocket Watch

Now that you have your pocket-watch, how do you look after it?

Winding

A pocket-watch should be wound once each day, either when you wake up, or when you go to sleep. Winding it more than once a day is not damaging to the watch, but it serves absolutely no purpose. A functional pocket-watch should be wound at least twelve turns. If it doesn’t, then it needs to be checked by a watchmaker. A pocket-watsh should be able to be wound right up and let to to run. If it’s wound up tight and it doesn’t run, it needs to be serviced. ‘Overwinding’ is a misnomer. It doesn’t mean that the watch has been wound too tightly and won’t run, it means that it’s been wound fully, but that the watch is too dirty internally, to run properly. This can be fixed with a routine servicing.

Storing your Watch

When you’re not wearing your watch, you should keep it in a clean, dry, dust-free place. In a jewellery-box, on a watch-stand or on a table where it won’t get bumped. Laying your watch on its back on your bedside table when you’re not using it (such as before going to bed) is perfectly fine.

My two pocket-watches sitting and hanging from their watch-stands on my desk, in company with my other great passion…my fountain pens!

Caring for your Watch

The caseback of the watch should be opened as rarely as possible, to prevent dust from getting inside the movement. Never try any of your own mechanics on your watch unless you’re actually studying watchmaking. The only exception to this is moving the regulator to get the watch to keep better time.

Keep your watch away from water, heights and dust. Antique and vintage pocket-watches are not waterproof or shockproof and both water and a significant-enough jolt are enough to send them back to the watchmaker. Keep the watch dust-free by keeping the caseback closed at all times unless you really need to open it.

Servicing your Watch

In the old days, a pocket-watch had to be serviced every two years. These days, you should have it serviced every five years (if you use it regularly) or every ten years (if you don’t). It’s important to find a watchmaker who will do a good job servicing your watch. If he charges less than $100 for a servicing…find another guy. If he promises to have the watch back to you quicker than two weeks…find another guy. If this person’s idea of a watchmaker is someone who changes batteries, does engraving and puts on watch-straps…find another guy.

Pocket-watches are delicate, fine machines that only an expert watchmaker should service. Servicing will cost at least $100-$200 (sometimes more, if the watch is exceptionally fine or exceptionally terrible!) and should take about 2-4 weeks. There’s over a hundred tiny little components inside a pocket-watch and they all have to be checked for integrity and quality, so servicing a pocket-watch takes time. Don’t expect it to be done in a hurry.

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

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

How many things here could you identify?

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

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

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

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

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

What is a Shaving-Scuttle?

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

How it was Used

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

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

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

Using a Shaving Scuttle Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

…”Please sir, I want some more”.
The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralysed with wonder; the boys with fear.
“What!” said the master at length, in a faint voice.
“Please sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more!”
The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arms; and shrieked aloud for the beadle…

While this might sound light-hearted and funny to us today in the 21st century, this exchange, taken from Charles Dickens’ novel ‘Oliver Twist’, was anything but. For thousands of impoverished children such as Oliver, ending up in a workhouse was a grim and terrifying reality, a world of forced labour, starvation, little food and water, mediocre medical-care, corruption and loneliness. This article will examine what workhouses were, how they operated, who used them and what eventually happened to the workhouse system.

The Workhouse Myth

We all of us, have a Dickensian view of workhouses as places as bad as, or even worse than, prisons. A place where people were punished for being poor, a place where, once you were in there, you were in there for life, a place of abuse, corruption, misery, hardship and loneliness, despite the fact that these were supposed to symbolise the humanitarian and social-welfare side of the governments of Victorian England. Popular culture will tell you that children as young as five were given boring, finicky jobs to do, for hours a day, to be fed tiny amounts of cheap, disgusting gruel and that husbands were separated from wives and that children were separated from their parents. The elderly were treated with shocking indifference and that workhouse masters and matrons were often abusive, thieving, corrupt people who picked pennies and pounds from the already meagre workhouse coffers to line their own pockets, disregarding the suffering of others.

But was this what workhouses were really like? Or is this just thanks to Hollywood and Mr. Dickens? Or is the truth more terrifying than we could imagine?

The Truth of the Workhouse

As much as we might like to kid ourselves, the fact of the matter was that workhouses were this bad. There were some, rare exceptions, but for the dozens of parish workhouses dotted throughout England, life for their thousands of inmates (not ‘occupants’ or ‘residents’ or ‘guests’…INMATES), was about as low as you could go. Not even prison was this bad.

Workhouses housed their inmates under such appalling conditions, fed them next to nothing and took such an indifferent stance to their suffering mainly because they didn’t have much choice in the matter. Workhouses were funded by the government and the government gave the workhouse masters absolutely tiny budgets to run institutions the size of prisons! In order to feed and clothe and house their hundreds of inmates, workhouse masters had to scrimp, save, stretch and squeeze every single penny for all it was worth. If this meant serving substandard food or providing barely-decent sleeping-quarters or if this meant not giving the inmates roast turkey at Christmas…that was what they did. The fact that the workhouse masters and matrons were not paid much for their depressing work only made them even more corruptable, and it wasn’t unknown for masters and matrons to dip their fingers into the cashbox and help themselves to the workhouse’s funds.

The Birth of the Workhouse

Given all these terrible conditions, why were workhouses created? What was their purpose? When did this system of housing the destitute and poor in such horrendous conditions begin?

The origins of workhouses go back several hundred years, all the way to the 16th century. Back then, relief and social support for the poor and homeless was messy and unorganised. Little thought was given to people who made up the dregs of society; they were something not to be spoken of, seen or attended to. Old clothes and leftover food was sometimes given to paupers who had no way of supporting themselves, but such gestures of humanitarianism were few and far between.

The workhouse system was born out of the Poor Laws; a collection of laws, rules and regulations passed by the governments of the United Kingdom to look after the needy, beginning in the 17th century. The laws were in place to provide shelter, work, food and clothing for the disabled poor, the young, the elderly and able-bodied paupers who had no homes, money or means of support. They were housed in large, prison-like structures called ‘workhouses’ where the inmates wore distinctive uniforms and performed menial, repetitive, dangerous and boring tasks for hours at a time, every single day.

The workhouse as we think of it today was born in the 17th century and each parish or county generally had at least one workhouse for the housing of its poor, homeless or disabled. However, ideas regarding social welfare were very different in the 18th and 19th centuries, to what we think of as social welfare today.

Living in a Workhouse

Workhouses flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries, and these were considered their boom-years. The Industrial Revolution had brought all kinds of jobs to the United Kingdom, but the revolution also brought soaring crime-rates and desperate poverty and unemployment. The workhouse system was there to try and do something about all this poverty and unemployment, by giving paupers a place to live and work. But how did you end up in a workhouse?

People who ended up in workhouses were people who couldn’t support themselves and relied on the government to support them instead. This included such groups of people as:

– The Elderly (those who could not support themselves, or who were a burden on their families).
– The Young (children).
– The Infirm (disabled).
– The Unemployed (those who couldn’t find work, but were able-bodied).
– The Homeless (those who had no permanent address).

Orphaned children generally ended up in workhouses. Either their parents had died and they had no-one to look after them, or they were illegitimate children and nobody wanted to look after them. If parents were deemed unable to look after their offspring, the government took them away and put them into workhouses. Being sent to a workhouse was one of the most terrifying things that you could tell a Victorian child.

So, how did you get into a workhouse? And once in, how did you leave?

The Ins and Outs of the Workhouse System

First gaining an entry, and possibly later, an exit from a workhouse, was a lengthy and fiddly process, involving a Black Forest of paperwork. When you entered a workhouse, you had to fill in a personal-information form. This form had all your bog-standard ID questions: Name, age, occupation, place of residence, marital status, offspring and so-on. Once your paperwork had cleared, you were given a bath, a medical checkup and then you were issued with a workhouse uniform (wearing your own clothes was not allowed. They would be removed, to be placed in a locker or storage-room). You were then led to join the rest of the workhouse population. If you were found to be ill in any way, you might still be allowed to enter the workhouse, but you might have to serve a period of quarantine, first.

Workhouses were deliberately harsh to prevent people from relying on them. As I will explain in more detail further down, it was believed that if you gave the poor an inch, they’d take a yard for themselves. No compassion or luxury was to be given to them, as this was only to make them even lazier and more dependent on the state than they already were.

Once you entered a workhouse, you pretty much gave up all your rights and priveliges. Parents were seperated from their children, whether they wanted to be or not. Husbands and wives were seperated from each other and the aged from the young and so-forth. Strict segregation was rigidly enforced. Families who moved into workhouses were broken up on arrival. If you arrived at a workhouse as a family, it was assumed immediately that you were a bad parent and were unfit to look after your own children…so the State would look after them for you. This, despite the fact that you might actually have been a very good parent. Parents had no say in the matter and their children were taken away from them.

A diagram of a workhouse. You didn’t even have to go inside most workhouses to see the evidence of segregation

Workhouse hours were military-like in structure. You woke up early, between six and seven in the morning. You had breakfast, you washed, and then you started work. After several hours, you had a break to have lunch. Then, more work until dinnertime and then bed, which was 8:00pm, every night. Children were supposed to be taught their lessons and their routine might vary slightly, with boys and girls being taken to schoolrooms to be taught how to read and write, but workhouses which offered education-programs were few and far between. Children could be treated appallingly bad and they could be sold off like chattels or apprenticed out to tradesmen of questionable character, completely without their parents’ knowledge or assent. Business fat-cats who ran places such as cotton-mills would go to workhouses and buy little boys for a few pence each, take them away from the workhouse and put them to work in the mills, for which the children were not paid, but were provided with bed and board.

Leaving a workhouse was a fairly straightforward ordeal. You gave your notice, you filled out your paperwork (again), your clothes were returned to you, and off you went. Of course, if a family was in the workhouse and if one member (usually the husband and father) left, then the rest of the family had to go, too. Some people treated workhouses like cheap hotels, coming and going as they pleased, despite the lengthy paperwork. Paupers already inside the workhouse could be granted a temporary leave-of-absence to attend various events such as funerals, christenings, weddings and to attend to sick or dying relatives. Able-bodied inmates were permitted to leave in order to look for work. If they found steady work, then they would probably leave the workhouse to try and get a fresh start in life. In most cases, however, workhouse inmates stayed in the workhouse for months or years and in some cases, even decades. In one rare occasion, a report listed fifteen inmates who had spent over sixty years living in workhouses!

Workhouse Conditions

Living in a workhouse was about as far from luxury as you could possibly imagine. Its occupants were basically being punished for the horrible, unspeakable, ghastly and sinful crime of being…poor.

To understand why workhouses were what they were, one needs to understand Victorian morality.

These days, we accept and understand that some people, for reasons completely outside their control, are just not able to support themselves. Maybe they don’t have any money because they can’t find work, despite trying day after day after week after month. Perhaps their disabilities prevent them from making a living for themselves. Perhaps they’re too young or too old to support themselves.

But to the typical Victorian who lived in the mid 1800s, this was not their way of thinking. The Victorian mindset was almost the complete opposite to how we would think, now in the 21st century. Back in the 1850s, it was generally understood that poverty was caused by an inherent immorality that was ingrained in you and completely unchangable. If you were a homeless beggar, it was your own fault. The poor, it was believed, were habitually lazy and slothful and not to be treated with any kind of compassion. Why should they? They didn’t bloody deserve it! If they were really something, they’d go and find themselves a bloody job! No thought was given to WHY these people were like what they were, just that they were, that this was natural and that try as they might, “proper, upstanding Britons” would not be able to change that.

With this mindset, it’s probably not surprising to know that most people saw no reason to splurge money on the poor, since they saw it as a waste of time. If you gave the poor money, they would at once, piss it all away on booze, broads, drugs and gambling! If you showed the poor any compassion, it would only encourage them to become even more lazy and dependent on the State. It was for this reason that workhouse budgets were so incredibly small. Nobody saw the necessity or the reason to give them any more money than the absolute minimum needed to run an institution.

Life in a workhouse was gruelling at best. Medical care was almost nonexistent, as was privacy, decent food, clothing, bedding and anything else. Regardless of age or gender, workhouse inmates were generally treated appallingly badly. What workhouses that did have medical care often provided it to an incredibly substandard level. Nurses handling dangerous chemicals and medications were often drafted from the inmates themselves. With no medical training, no education and not even the ability to read the labels on the jars, these women were in charge of caring for their sick companions.

Education for children in the workhouse was often nonexistent. Eventually people understood that the only way to get the kids off the streets and out of the workhouses was to give them a chance to read and write. As the years progressed, structured teaching and schooling did make its way into some workhouses, but these children were generally the lucky few.

Workhouse Food

Workhouse food was very basic, although, as some research suggests, not as lacking in nutrition as some people might think. The staple of workhouse cuisine was ‘gruel’. If you’ve never had gruel, or never heard of it, you’ll wonder how the hell anyone could eat it! Gruel is basically a cheap, cheap porridge, generally made of oats or oatmeal. It wasn’t very tasty and not amazingly filling either. Paupers never got enough of it to fill themselves up completely, anyway. Given all these delightful characteristics, why was it served?

One word: Cheap.

A typical workhouse dining-room. Note the religious slogans on the walls. Workhouse masters and officials said that they were doing ‘God’s work’ and that therefore, the paupers, who often recieved appalling treatment, had no right to complain

Don’t forget that most workhouses had very small budgets. The Master of the workhouse was under great pains to make his provision from the government to stretch as far as he could. Despite this, though, the workhouse diet was fairly varied. Apart from gruel, inmates also ate meat (beef or mutton, usually), cheese, bread, frumenty (a dish made of boiled wheat, with milk, eggs, sugar, currents and a few nuts). Drinks allowed in the workhouse included tea and milk (generally for the young or the elderly). Most other people drank record-shattering levels of beer, from one to up to three or four pints of beer a day! And not just adults, but kids, too! While we might not understand this today, you have to remember that in the 18th and 19th centuries, water quality was generally very questionable. To guard against possible waterborne diseases, beer was offered instead of water, as beer uses no water in its production-process. Everyone drank beer, even the kids. They got beer with a lower alcohol-content, but it was still beer.

Workhouse Work

A workhouse was not a prison. It was not a boarding-house, it was not a boarding-school. It was not a homeless shelter or a work-camp…it was all of these things. And of course, in a workhouse, the main thing you had to do…was work! But what kind of work were you expected to do?

The main chores associated with workhouses were the picking of oakum, the breaking of stones and the grinding up of old bones, along with various other jobs. But…why, why, and…why? Mainly just to give the inmates something to do. They were a cheap, disposable form of labour which could be forced to do all the lowest and most menial of jobs which had to be done, but which nobody else but a completely down-on-his-luck pauper would ever do. But what kind of work?

Oakum Picking

All the jobs inside workhouses were incredibly boring. And repetitive. They might also be dangerous, but mostly, they were just boring. Oakum-picking was one of the most boring ever. It is also the most famous of all workhouse jobs. It’s really the stereotypical workhouse job, you might say. Long, boring, pointless…

But what is ‘oakum’ anyway?

Oakum is rope. Or more precisely, rope-fibres. If you were in a workhouse and you were given the task of picking oakum, you were given a hunk of old rope which once belonged to a sailing-ship, and you were told to ‘pick’ it. This meant ripping the rope apart, breaking it down from the cable to the rope to the yarn to thread, right down to the tiny, itsy-bitsy little fibres of hemp! While on the surface, this sounds pretty easy, it gets trickier the smaller you go, since you need to dig your nails into the rope-fibres to pull them apart. Once the rope was all broken down, you were given a new piece to start on.

Women picking oakum (the fuzzy stuff at their feet) in a London workhouse in 1902

The picked oakum was collected and then sent to the docks or the harbour. Oakum was a crucial material in shipbuilding in the 18th and 19th centuries; the oakum was hammered into the seams between the planks on ship’s hulls to fill in the gaps. The oakum swelled up when it came in contact with water, and so created a relatively watertight seal.

Stone-breaking

Stone-breaking involved smashing and hitting lumps of rock such as limestone, with sledgehammers and pickaxes. The stones were smashed, pummelled and whacked until they shattered into tiny pieces, each one about the size of a small to medium-sized pebble. The smashed rocks were used in roadbuilding and the smashed rock-fragments were passed through a mesh or a grille in a special storage-room in the workhouse, to determine whether the smashed rocks were of the correct size. If the pebbles didn’t pass through the mesh, they had to be smashed again and again until they did. Stone-breaking was a job performed by male inmates due to the physically demanding nature of the task. Vagrants and wanderers (travellers, in other words) might be forced to do stone-breaking in return for a night’s bed and board at a workhouse, on their journey.

Bone-grinding

Another common workhouse chore was bone-grinding or bone-breaking. Bones, typically from cattle or sheep, were delivered to the workhouse where the inmates smashed them up over and over and ground them up until they were a powdery consistency. The grinding and crushing of the bones was necessary because the ‘bonemeal’ powder was used to manufacture fertilisers for farmers to use on their crops. In one particular workhouse in Andover, England, in 1846, the mishandling of funds and the general brutality of the workhouse master had reduced many of the paupers to sucking the marrow out of the bones that they were supposed to be crushing for fertiliser. The master, a man named M’Dougal, was fired for his treatment of his charges. Bone-crushing was banned as a workhouse chore shortly after the Andover Scandal.

Wood-chopping

Before gas-stoves, before electricity, before central heating, firewood was essential to everyday life. This being the case, it’s probably not surprising that one of the other main jobs in the workhouse was the splitting and chopping of firewood.

Deaths in the Workhouse

Considering that workhouses were such depressing places, and also considering the fact that the infirm, elderly, sick or mentally-ill often made use of them, it’s probably no surprise that people died in workhouses. But what happened when they did?

If a person did die in a workhouse, their death was recorded in the usual manner, by filling out a certificate of death. If it was possible, the deceased’s family was notified and asked if they desired to hold a private funeral. If the family did not wish (or as was more often the case, was unable) to hold a private funeral, then the workhouse took care of the burial instead. Dead inmates were buried in local churchyards, in a churchyard of their choice, or even in the workhouse graveyard. Coffins were cheap and the graves were usually unmarked.

Changing Times

The workhouse system could not last forever, though. Although conditions had gradually improved over the centuries, from the 1600s until the early 20th century, changing social values and mindsets was what really changed things in the end. By the early 1900s, attitudes towards things such as pensions, the infirm, the homeless, the elderly and those unable to support themselves, were slowly changing. There was a time where people who had pensions were seen as lazy dregs and strains on society because they wouldn’t get a job. Similarly, people considered it an insult if they were offered charity, because it suggested that they were lazy and stupid. But eventually, the notion that some people simply COULD NOT support themselves, no matter what, began to seep through society and attitudes and social welfare changed with the times. Workhouse conditions changed dramatically and instead of being places of misery and sorrow and depression, began to resemble rest-homes or the homeless-shelters that we know today. Segregation of gender and age was gradually removed, but by then, the workhouse’s days were numbered.

The Abolishment of Workhouses

Despite lasting centuries and despite providing questionable care and refuge for the unfortunates, paupers and beggars in their communities, workhouses would not last much longer. The workhouse system which Charles Dickens made famous in Oliver Twist would eventually be abolished, although this did not finally happen until 1930.

Workhouse structures still existed, but they now resembled something more akin to an aged care home instead of a prison, a place where the elderly, sick, infirm or disabled could find a home and refuge and where the state would take care of them if they were not able to care for themselves.