05/08/2016 by Scheong

Musical Rallying Cries: The History of Our National Anthems

As the Olympics draw near, a lot of us will probably be thinking thoughtful thoughts of national pride, and waving flags and cheering on our sportsmen and women as they battle for gold, silver and bronze medals!…Although no medals used in the Olympics have been made of actual gold or silver, for over a hundred years (Whaaat?? Oh come on…!).

Nevertheless, during the games, there will no doubt be a lot of singing of national anthems and the waving of national flags. So that’s what this posting is all about – national anthems, and their histories!

A national anthem is meant to be the defining song of a nation, a state, a culture, and a people. Its lyrics are meant to embody what that country is, what it stands for, and what it holds dear. Considering how important this stuff sounds, it might surprise you to know that most national anthems have not been around for as long as you might think. And what are they singing about, anyway!?

A Brief History of National Anthems

it may surprise you to know that the whole ‘idea’ of a nation having a specific national song, to be sung during important state occasions, is actually a pretty new one! While it is true that the songs and the lyrics used in many national anthems are centuries old, the concept of each nation having its own anthem only dates back to the 19th century, the 18th, at the very earliest.

Prior to this point in time, most nations did not have national anthems. The almost persistent state of warfare throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, and the constantly shifting national boundaries which resulted from these conflicts, probably made national anthems a waste of time!

The period of relative peace in the last quarter of the 1800s and the solidification of national boundaries during this time, is probably what led to a rise in nationalistic feelings, and increasing interest in each country having its own national song.

So, what are the histories behind some of the world’s most famous national anthems? Where did they come from? What do they mean? What the hell are they actually singing about!? Let’s have a look and listen. Here, I’ll be covering the national anthems of six nations: Australia, the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia, and looking into their histories and meanings.

“Advance Australia Fair”

Country: The Commonwealth of Australia.
Adopted: 1984.
Previous: “God Save the King”

Although Australia still has pretty close ties to Great Britain – we still have the Union Jack on the flag, for example – and the queen, bless her, is still the head of state – In the postwar era of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Australia began to question its relationship with Britain. The nation’s vulnerability to invasion by the Japanese during the Second World War had highlighted to Australia that it could not rely on Britain for assistance, despite their history and shared culture.

The fact of the matter was that Australia had to grow up and stand on its own two feet, and not depend on the unreliable assistance from a mother country on the other side of the world, one of the reasons why Australia has had stronger ties to the United States since the end of the Second World War.

Because of these feelings, Australia decided to do away with its old anthem, ‘God Save the King’ in 1974, and launched a competition to find a new anthem. It took ten years and a lot of umming-and-aahing, until ‘Advance Australia Fair’ was proposed, and adopted, in 1984.

Written in the 1870s, Advance Australia Fair was meant to celebrate all that was good about this island nation. Its rich natural resources, unique place in the world, and its links with Britain. While not all verses from the original song, written by Peter Dobbs McCormick in 1878, were used, the song was intended to paint a picture of Australia as a young, strong country with a rich past, and with much to strive for in the future.

…Personally I find it hard to respect any national anthem which you can also sing to the tune of the ‘Gilligan’s Island’ theme song. We used to do it all the time when I was a kid, just to piss off our teachers in school. It was fun! If you don’t believe me, find the lyrics, and give it a shot, yourself. Still, I guess it’s better than one of the other songs which was included in the vote: ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

“The Star-Spangled Banner”

Country: The United States of America
Adopted: 1931
Previous: “Hail Columbia” (unofficial).

From 1777 to 1930, the United States of America had no national anthem which was recognised as being official throughout the land. The only one which really came close was ‘Hail Columbia‘, which dated back to the days of the Revolution (and which today, is still played for the Vice President); however, throughout the later half of the 1800s, and leading into the early 20th century, ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ had been growing in popularity. Numerous votes and petitions had been cast and signed, but it was not until 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, that the song was officially declared the U.S. national anthem.

For a song that’s probably been featured on TV, in films, and on popular shows more times than any other, it can be surprising how many people don’t actually know what it’s about. So apart from the obvious fact that it’s about a flag, what are the song’s lyrics actually saying?

The song dates back to 1814, when it was written by Francis Scott Key, an American citizen trapped on a British warship, during the Battle of Baltimore, during September of 1814.

Part of the battle was the British bombardment of Fort McHenry, the coastal artillery battery and fort, which protected Baltimore Harbor. Despite nonstop artillery fire and bombardment by explosive shells, the fort endured, successfully holding the Royal Navy at bay, and keeping its ships far enough away from the Harbor to prevent the landing of troops.

The ‘bombs bursting in air’ and the ‘rocket’s red glare’ mentioned in the song refer to the artillery shells, and the flares which were shot at, and over the fort during the course of the battle, in order to destroy, and illuminate the target. It was the light provided by these flares that told people on both sides of the engagement whether or not ‘Old Glory’ was still flying over the fort, or whether the Americans had been forced to strike their colours and surrender to the enemy.

After days of shelling, the navy was almost out of ammunition, whereas Fort McHenry had survived relatively unscathed. The flag remained flying, and the British lost the battle. Today, the original ‘star spangled banner’ – the flag flown over the fort, is preserved at the Smithsonian Institute, donated to the museum in 1912.

While you might’ve learned all this in history class, one thing you might not know is that the tune to which the Star Spangled Banner is sung, is actually an old, English drinking song!

Written in 1780, ‘An Anacreon in Heaven‘ was the official ‘theme-song’ to the Anacreontic Society – an 18th century London gentleman’s club comprised mostly of amateur musicians. The club (and the song) got its name from Anacreon, and ancient Greek poet, and it was the song that the members of the club would sing during official meetings. Since copyright laws were almost nonexistent in the 18th century, almost anybody could steal anybody’s music back then, provided they knew how to write it, and play it – which was how it ended up as the music for the American national anthem.

In the end, The Star Spangled Banner glories in the resilience of the American people and their determination never to surrender and take down their flag, and celebrates their strength under fire.

“La Marseillaise”

Country: France
Adopted: 1795
Previous: N/A

La Marseillaise is probably the most famous national anthem in the world! And also, one of the oldest! Written in 1792 during the French Revolution, it became one of the most famous songs associated with the Revolution, and the various wars which followed, from 1792-1802.

Even if you don’t speak French, just the tune sounds triumphant, gallant, glorious, rousing and patriotic, which was exactly its point, when it was designed as a rallying cry for French soldiers when they went to war against Austria during the Revolution.

Although France has gone through numerous republics, restorations, monarchies, abdications and more republics since the 1790s, its national anthem has remained unchanged since the late 18th century.

La Marseillaise is so famous that it’s been used in countless movies and TV shows throughout the years, most famously in ‘Casablanca‘, during the ‘dueling anthems’ scene (although the other song, ‘Der Wacht Am Rhine’, ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, isn’t actually a national anthem). It was also used jokingly during the end of The Simpsons Movie, where it was played over the end-credits, with rewritten lyrics.

“Deutschlandlied”

Country: The Republic of Germany
Adopted: 1922.
Previous: N/A

“Deustchlandlied”, or ‘The Song of Germany’, or “Deutschland, Deutschland, uber Alles”, has been the official, and unofficial national anthem of Germany since the 1800s. The original song was written in the 1840s, and it has remained popular ever since.

Today, only the third verse of the song is sung as the official anthem. This is because the first and second verses had been tainted by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s, who favoured them due to their rather overnationalistic airs, and this was seen as being inappropriate after the Second World War.

The music for “Deutschlandlied” comes from “Gott Erhalte Franz den Kaiser”, or “God Save Emperor Francis“, originally an Austrian patriotic tune written in the 1790s…you know? When France and Austria were at war? Like when France wrote “La Marseillaise”?

The song has been Germany’s official anthem since 1922, although it was drastically changed after the Second World War, with the third verse singing about freedom, unity and justice for all those living in the German Fatherland – certainly something that didn’t happen during the 1930s!

“God Save the King”

Country: The United Kingdom
Adopted: 1745
Previous: N/A

“God Save the King” (or Queen, or maybe both!) has been the unofficial national anthem of the United Kingdom since the 1740s, and is arguably one of the oldest national anthems in the world!

The song was written in 1744, but gained widespread popularity in 1745, because of the Jacobite Rising, where Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”), attempted to invade England from Scotland, and take the English throne. The famous Battle of Culloden, which saw the Jacobite forces slaughtered by government troops, spelled an end to that fantasy, and “God Save the King” became popular as a song of celebration throughout England. The invaders had been held back, and the monarchy had been saved for another generation!

Apart from Britain, ‘God Save the King’ was the national anthem of many of Britain’s colonies, dominions, and overseas dependencies, such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Today, it’s still the royal anthem of many of these countries, but it’s since been replaced by local national anthems in many of the commonwealth realms.

“The State Anthem of the Russian Federation”

Country: The Russian Federation
Adopted: 2000
Previous: The Internationale, God Save the Tsar.

Of all the European countries, Russia is one with one of the most turbulent histories. Tsars and tyrants, invasions, wars, rising and falling fortunes, revolts and revolutions. All this is reflected in the history of the nation’s national anthems.

Russia’s first national anthem was “God Save the Tsar”, which was the official one from 1833 until 1917, when the longstanding Romanov Dynasty, which had ruled over Russia since the 17th century, was finally overthrown during the Russian Revolution.

After the fall of the Romanovs, the anthem was promptly changed. First, it was ‘The Workers’ Marseillaise’ – and it even had the same music as the French ‘La Marseillaise’! This was changed, just a year later in 1918, to ‘The Internationale’, which became a popular communist and socialist anthem throughout the 20th century.

‘The Internationale’ remained the anthem until it was changed…again!…in 1944, to the ‘State Anthem of the Soviet Union’, which was changed…AGAIN!…in 1977! The lyrics were also changed during this time. Early versions of the Soviet anthem were full of praise for Comrade Stalin. After Stalin’s death in the 1950s, many of the Stalin-centric lyrics were removed, and the anthem was rewritten, to try and blot out the damage he had done to the Russian nation.

The current Russian national anthem came out in 2000, and was yet ANOTHER reworking of the original Soviet anthem from the 1940s. Because of its controversial past, some Russians have actually protested its use, and have even refused to stand, or sing it, when it’s played on state occasions.

01/08/2016 by Scheong

Mid-Victorian Mahogany-Sleeved Naval Telescope. Ca. 1860.

“Cap’n! Presents off the larboard bow!”
“I see ’em! Ready the launch! You there – come about into the wind! We’ll not let them escape us now! Bring up the harpoons!”

The greatest thing about collecting antiques is that you always find the best birthday presents for yourself, if you search hard enough! I picked up this stunning beauty for my birthday! Yes, I’m officially…29. Oh, the horror, shame, and disgrace of it all…!

Up Close and Personal!

Aaaaanyway…

What we have here is an old-fashioned nautical telescope, as was used on the sailing-ships of old. And boy is it ever a monster! It’s 11in. closed, extends to 39in drawn out, and weighs a substantial 1lb 10oz (approx 750g)! A lightweight, it ain’t!

Features of Construction

This stunning antique features entirely brass construction, with the exception of the wooden sleeve around the barrel, and of course, the glass in the lenses. It is possessed of four, brass draw-tubes, as you can see in the photograph below:

All Drawn Out…

A four-tube telescope means that it has four tubular extensions which collapse into each other, and which then all slide into the main barrel at the front of the telescope.

I’m not sure how old this telescope is, to be honest. It’s of a style that was widely manufactured from the 1700s right up to the 1900s, but the fellow I got it from believed it to be from around 1850 or 1860. For something roughly 150 years old — after extensive cleaning — it does work pretty well! The threaded brass coupling-rings hold well (or they do, after a minor adjustment), and the tubes slide in and out smoothly, if a bit more firmly than I’m used to!

The telescope has a two-piece achromatic lens at the front, a two-lens relay system inside the smallest draw-tube, and an eyepiece lens at the far end – so four (or five, depending on how you count it), lenses in all!

Here it is, next to my solid brass, pocket telescope from the 1890s. As you can see, there’s a huge size difference!

As one would probably expect from something like this, it’s got a GREAT range, and surprisingly clear optics for a piece that’s obviously seen quite a hard life. There’s one small blemish on an interior lens which, try as I might, I couldn’t remove, but other than that – the clarity is impressive.

Using the Telescope

Since it is 150 years old, I expected the telescope to be dirty. I didn’t expect it to be THIS dirty! It required EXTENSIVE cleaning to get it to function even halfway decent! And I’m still cleaning it! But despite that, it’s beginning to show signs of the smoothness of function it once had.

To draw the telescope, I’ve found it’s best to hold it at the near end of the barrel (away from the lens) and to pull firmly, but smoothly, to get the draw tubes out, and to hold the barrel in the middle, when snapping the tubes shut again.

As I said, this telescope is quite chunky, so using it can be a bit of a challenge. I generally hold the largest, or second-largest draw-tube in order to balance this beast, and then adjust the focus by sliding the smallest draw-tube in and out, until clarity is achieved.

The good thing is that this is done relatively easily. The bad thing is that it’s surprisingly tiring on the arms! A telescope that weighs about a pound and a half doesn’t sound like much to carry around (and it isn’t), but when you’ve held it up in one hand for any length of time while trying to look through it, the weight does start to pull on your shoulders a bit! One wonders how the sailors of old ever managed to use this thing on the rocking, rolling deck of a sailing ship!

Cleaning the Telescope

The one saving grace about this telescope – and most telescopes of this design – is that they’re extraordinarily easy to clean. All the draw-tubes, lenses and coupling-rings screw together. All you need is a box of tissues, some oil, and a firm grip to screw and unscrew, and you can pull apart the entire telescope to clean it. There aren’t that many parts, and there’s no way you can confuse one part for another, so they’re very easy to put back together again.

You don’t need any special tools or equipment – just a few basic cleaning supplies and a spare afternoon. I think it’s amazing how something which is so easily assembled is at the same time, so incredibly powerful, and yet, so simply constructed. Even a child could do this. I love the thoughtfulness of the design in that the manufacturer imagined that the owner might want to disassemble his own telescope for cleaning and maintenance. I don’t know many consumer products today which are this user-friendly!

Repairing the Telescope

As much fun as this telescope is to use and to clean and polish, when I bought it, the telescope also had one significant flaw – It wouldn’t stay together.

As I said above, the telescope’s components quite literally just screw, one-into-the-other, in a set sequence of construction. Easily followed and impossible to screw up. A few good twists would be all that’d be needed to pull the thing apart, clean it, and reassemble it. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case with this telescope.

Probably due to overzealous cleaning in the past, or possibly a manufacturing fault, or simply just 150-years’ worth of wear and tear, the thread that held in the largest draw-tube (the one which connects to the barrel) was not gripping properly. It simply refused to hold. After screwing it in as hard as possible, it’d simply pop right out again after one good pull! Hardly ideal!

I pulled the telescope apart and cleaned the threads, and then to fix this problem, I wrapped ordinary paper masking-tape around the threads on the coupling-ring. Just once.

Group Shot! My big telescope, my small telescope, and my field glasses all together. All brass, all antique. What a pretty trio they make.

I trimmed off the excess tape with a pocket-knife, and then screwed the two components back together. No oil, no graphite powder, nothing. Just a simple layer of sticky tape. It cost me literally nothing! and yet…the repair worked!

Just one layer of tape was all I needed to build up the necessary thickness, friction and ‘bite’ necessary for the threads to screw in smoothly, and for the connection to hold! it took me less than five minutes to repair. Don’t be daunted by broken antiques – sometimes all it takes is a bit of creativity to return them to full functionality.

Video

Last but not least, here’s a short video I made about the telescope:

28/07/2016 by Scheong

The Sound of History: Antique Whistles

For hundreds of years, noisemakers of all kinds have been used for all kinds of purposes. In this posting, I’m looking at the history and the impact of antique whistles, specifically those made from the 1700s and 1800s, up to the mid-1900s.

Whistles have been made out of innumerable materials for hundreds of years. Bone, ivory, wood, silver, steel, brass, and plastic, but it wasn’t until the 1700s that the first industrially-produced whistles started being manufactured.

For much of history, whistles had been made by hand – usually out of natural materials like wood, bone, or ivory. Except for in a few specialised industries and professions, whistles were generally regarded as toys or musical instruments, their practicality as a noisemaker unrealised, or at least unappreciated, for much of history.

Boatswain’s Pipes

One of the first industries to see a practical use for whistles beyond being playthings was the navy. Long, thin pipes with spherical bowls or balls at the end were carried by boatswains (or ‘bosuns’), and these were used by the boatswain and his assistants (boatswain’s mates) to pass orders on the crowded, noisy decks of early sailing ships. As it was impossible to hear shouted commands from one end of a ship to the other, and over the noise of the wind, waves and creaking timbers, boatswain’s pipes were used instead.

The extremely high-pitched sound of the pipes could easily be heard over even the most intense of storms, and over time, short tunes and series of pitches were used to signal various commands such as All Hands on Deck – Weigh Anchor – Boats Away, and so-on. Boatswain’s pipes are still used in the navy today, although they’re more for ceremonial use, rather than for passing orders.

Police Whistles

Organised, official, state-run police-forces started becoming a reality in the early 1800s, starting in Scotland, then spreading to London, then the rest of Britain, and eventually around the world.

Early police constables and patrolmen manned their beats and called for help using heavy, wooden rattles. Rattles were easily broken, were uncomfortable to use, were heavy, and could be taken from the officer and used as a weapon. They were also not very loud, and in a busy street, a rattle was indistinguishable from the clatter of horseshoes – rendering it virtually useless.

Metropolitan Police Whistle from the 1930s. Made by J. Hudson & Co.

Whistles had been used on and off throughout the history of policing, but it wasn’t until the 1870s and 1880s that rattles were finally phased out entirely, and replaced with whistles. Whistles were louder, smaller, lighter and easier to use. They started replacing rattles on the London Metropolitan Police force (Scotland Yard) in 1883-1884, where they were famously supplied by Joseph Hudson & Co.

Joseph Hudson made his fortune when his dual-chamber pipe whistle was presented to Scotland Yard. He won the coveted contract to supply whistles to the London police force and his company, J. Hudson & Co (today, the Acme Whistle Company) grew by leaps and bounds, to become one of the largest, and most famous whistle-companies in the world!

What Were Whistles Used For?

Once it was found out how to manufacture large amounts of whistles, people suddenly realised that they needed whistles for a lot of different reasons! Joseph Hudson & Co alone, sold whistles to the police, to the army, to the fire-department, to sporting referees, to train guards, to naval officers and sailors, to railway conductors, cyclists, the boy scouts, the girl guides, and to the general public, as well!

The Acme BOY SCOUT whistle, from about 1920.

Over time, specific shapes and styles of whistles were used for different organisations, and today, whistles with markings on them which link them to specific institutions or organisations, such as hospitals, prisons, specific police-forces, fire-departments or army units are highly collectible.

Whistles on a whole, started dying out as a practical form of communication in the last quarter of the 20th century. Walkie-talkies, portable radios and mobile-phones meant that it was no longer necessary for so many people to carry whistles anymore. Organisations that had once carried whistles for decades, such as the police, fire services, the army and the navy started giving them up.

J. Hudson & Co. General-Service Whistle issued to the British Army during WWI. Dated to 1915.

Today, whistles are still used for sporting matches, or for safety and survival, but beyond this market, their use has dropped significantly. Some people still buy them for personal safety, for training dogs, for cycling and for emergency situations, but apart from exceptional circumstances, most other organisations or people don’t use them.

My Whistles Video

To close off this posting, here’s a video I uploaded a few days ago, displaying my own whistle collection:

22/07/2016 by Scheong

As Bold as Brass: Braving Antique Brassware

In looking over my blog I find that I have written about antique silver and how to read hallmarks, and various ways of cleaning antique silver and brass, but that I haven’t covered antique brassware itself, as a subject. Something I’m rather surprised at, considering that I love things made of brass! That being the case, what follows is a brief look at brassware. Some of its history, its range of applications, and why it was used for so many products for so many hundreds of years.

Solid brass fire extinguisher. Ca. 1915-1930.

A Brief Brassy History

Brass in one form or another, has existed since ancient times, but it wasn’t until after the Middle Ages, during the Renaissance era of the 1400s that brass as we know it today (an alloy of roughly 90% copper and 10% zinc) was discovered.

Early forms of brass were crude. Copper was the main ingredient, but the alloying metal could be any white metal which was available – tin (which would make either bronze, or pewter, depending on the ratios), and even lead!

Mortars and pestles were made of bronze, and then brass, for many centuries.

Zinc, the metal now used in conjunction with copper to make brass, started being available in Europe in the late 1500s. Prior to this point, most items were made of bronze – such as bells, door-knockers, and even early cannons! But with zinc now recognised as a new metal, its addition to copper to make brass heralded a new age in metalworking.

Its brightness meant that zinc lent to copper a light and reflective sheen, not always seen in bronze. This is what gives brass its bright and glittering shine, and just why it can be polished to such a stunning brilliance.

Brass’s inability to rust (since it contains no iron), and its bright sheen, has made it popular for centuries as the go-to metal for all kinds of products and household implements. Strength, rustproofing, easily cleaned, and with a golden shimmer. What could possibly be better?

Stuff Made of Brass

Ever since its discovery, and the refinement of the formula from which brass is made, brass has been used to make a truly staggering array of items over the centuries. Among other things, items made of brass include:

Candleholders.
Chandeliers.
Tableware.
Bells.
Gas-lighting fixtures.
Lanterns.
Lamps.
Fire-extinguishers.
Telescopes and binoculars.
Magnifying glasses.
Window-fittings.
Hardware on early cars.
Hardware on trunks and suitcases.
Mortars and pestles.

The reasons why so many things were made of brass were numerous.

Victorian-era brass telescope

Until the creation of the Bessemer Process for producing large amounts of steel became possible, brass was the go-to metal for a lot of applications. It was easier to produce, was long-lasting and had an attractive shine. Unlike steel, brass did not have to be painted, oiled or plated to prevent it from rusting and corroding. It could be lacquered if desired, to preserve its shine, but other than the occasional cleaning, required minimal maintenance.

Brass was extensively used in seafaring, for making things like clocks, compasses, telescopes, binoculars, bells, binnacles, telegraphs, portholes and countless other fittings and accessories found on board ships between the 1700s to the 1900s. Brass was the only metal that would reliably withstand such long-term contact with water.

Early motor-cars (veteran or ‘brass-era’ cars) used a lot of brass in their construction – most notably for headlights, window-frames, radiators, dials and gauges. Most cars were open-topped, based on carriage-designs of the era, and similar components made from steel wouldn’t have lasted. At the same time, early cars were expensive, and manufacturers wanted their vehicles to look attractive. One way of doing this was by outfitting their cars with attractive, brass hardware.

The Rise of Steel

Brass was used for a wide variety of applications well into the 20th century. It was not until after the First World War that the newly-invented stainless steel, which was much more resistant to rusting, and which could be produced in large quantities, started replacing brass in any serious way.

Regardless of this, brass continued to be the metal of choice in a number of manufacturing processes. Until the quartz revolution of the 1970s and 80s, mechanical watches and clocks were all made with brass gears and wheels, although this too, is now slowly being taken over by stainless steel. That said, there are some companies and some products which were, and which continue to be made of brass almost exclusively, either for tradition, or necessity, or style.

A lot of products commonly made of brass are now made of steel – like these Victorian-era countertop bells.

Zippo cigarette lighters are, except in rare circumstances, almost entirely made of brass. Occasionally some are made of steel, or sterling silver, or solid gold (usually collector pieces made in limited numbers), but apart from this, they’re almost all made of brass, and then usually plated, or finished in some manner, to hide the metal.

Solid brass chamberstick, modeled after a design from the 1600s

Some companies (such as the Skultuna brass foundry) still produce high quality brassware in the form of candleholders, mortars and pestles, pitchers and jugs, and various other homewares, drawn to brass by its golden shine.

Brass has sadly died out as the go-to metal for manufacturing in the 21st century. I’m not sure why this is, really. I suppose it’s because cheap, rustproof steel is easier to obtain and brass has simply gone out of fashion. Either way, I love antique and vintage brass, and I’ll always be seeking it out and collecting it, selling it, trading it, and of course, polishing it!

20/07/2016 by Scheong

Joseph Rodgers & Sons Geo. V. Ivory-Handled Budding Knife: A Case-Study in Researching Antiques!

You find the strangest things in charity shops when you huddle inside them to get out of the rain! I picked this up yesterday, while on the way home from town: An antique, ivory-handled knife.

I don’t know a great deal about it, to be honest. It was made by the famous Sheffield cutlery firm of Joseph Rodgers & Sons, and is in pretty good condition for its age; that much I knew. The rest, I had to find out through several hours of very careful detective-work!

Researching antiques is a fiddly business. Sometimes it’s impossible to find out anything, sometimes you can find out all kinds of things, and sometimes, only just part of what was potentially a much bigger story. It’s not always easy, or even possible, but if you do start on such a journey, it’s best to err on the side of caution and as ever, to use the Holmesian maxim: “Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth!”

So, let us begin! First, a close examination of the knife, and all textual evidence…

The blade is marked “JOSEPH RODGERS & SONS”:

The hilt is stamped with:

“G.R.”
“J. Rodgers
& Sons

6 Norfolk St.
Sheffield
ENGLAND”.

Researching the age of this knife is a classic example of why you need to consider all the evidence prior to jumping to conclusions. After much reading and deliberation, I dated it to the reign of King George V (1911-1936) and probably to the 1910s. This is based on the following evidence:

“G.R.” = Georgius Rex (“King George”). This tells me that it was made during the reign of *A* King George. It doesn’t tell me which one! it could’ve been George IV (which issued the Royal Warrant to Joseph Rodgers & Sons in 1822), or George V, or George VI!

“6 Norfolk Street, Sheffield” = HQ of J.R. & Sons from approx 1780, until the firm sold the premises in 1929. This tells me that it had to be made, most likely, in the 1910s or 1920s. This rules out George VI, who came to the throne in 1936.

“England” = This is a reference to the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, which decreed that all foreign-manufactured goods shipped into the ‘States had to have country-of-origin stamps on their products. This rules out George IV, who reigned from 1820-1830.

this being the case, the knife, whatever it was, had to be made in the reign of George V (1911-1936). I narrowed this date down to between 1911-1929, the year the shop closed, which would still make it between 87-to-105 years old, at the date of this posting. Which is pretty damn impressive!

If it was as old as I’d originally thought it to be (George IV), then this would be approaching 200 years in age! As it is, it’s about 100 years too young for that, but still a lovely piece of antique, ivory-handled cutlery. Now the only question is – what the hell is it?

The Purpose Revealed!

After much researching and questioning of other collectors and dealers, I’ve finally found out what it is! It’s an antique budding knife, used for pruning and budding trees, shrubbery and other plants and to maintain the plants and flowering bushes and trees in one’s garden! What a wonderful and interesting tool this is! Whoever owned this must’ve had quite a green thumb!

16/07/2016 by Scheong

Henry Sutton – Australia’s Unsung Inventor

Have you ever heard of a man named Henry Sutton?

Yeah I haven’t either. But apparently he was quite a guy.

Born in 1855 and dying in 1912, he was in every possible sense – a born and bred, true-blue Aussie inventor. I don’t mean that he, like so many countless millions of others, was born in England and then migrated to Australia. I mean that he was literally born in Australia – in the rural gold-rush town of Ballarat – which is one of the most Australian places you could possibly grow up in: Goldfields, native wildlife, scorching heat, freezing cold, venomous snakes, dusty earth, flies, mosquitoes, and poisonous spiders.

What could possibly be more Australian than that?

Among his many achievements, Sutton invented variations of (or made improvements on) such devices as telephones (which came to Melbourne in the 1880s), the television, early radio transmitters and receivers, batteries and dynamos, and he even had a hand in developing front-wheel drive for cars…Impressive, considering he died in 1912, when most people had hardly heard of cars, let alone owned one!

The Sutton family owned a series of musical instrument shops in Victoria, Australia at the time. No doubt being in contact with musical instruments, and all their finely-fitting mechanical parts from a young age would have shaped Henry’s mind and life, and turned him towards being the inventor that he would soon become.

It’s been my great pleasure to meet, and become friends with two of Henry Sutton’s direct descendants – His great-granddaughter, Lorayne Branch, and her cousin, the wonderful Kelly Sargent. In fact, it was from Kelly that I first heard about Henry Sutton.

When I met Lorayne last year, she told me how she bemoaned the fact that nobody had written…anything of note, really…about her illustrious ancestor…and she felt that an opportunity was being missed.

To this end, she decided to do it herself, go it alone, and write the first official biography of what is one of Australia’s most famous, but probably least-known sons. Henry Sutton. She’s even set up a GofundMe page. If you want to find out more, then visit the link and learn more about the history of this fascinating man, and donate, if you feel so-inclined 🙂

15/07/2016 by Scheong

My New Pinterest Boards!

Pinterest is pretty cool, except that a lot of the photographs on there are pretty damn awesome. And my photography is, more often than not – not-awesome. On a good day it might be alright, but I’ve never considered my skills behind the camera to be anything worth showing off, or writing home about for any reason whatsoever.

Which is a shame.

A shame for two reasons:

One is that I like photography, however mediocre my own end products might be. And because…

Two, I like antiques, which are infinitely photogenic. I mean, they’re so beautiful that it’s almost impossible to take a bad photograph of one, provided that you have at least a basic level of photographic skill.

With this in mind, about two months ago, I set up my new Pinterest account and started uploading photographs. If anything, it’s made me up my game considerably when it comes to photography, although I don’t think I’d ever take anything which might even start to be construed as being ‘professional’ quality.

But, be that as it may, I decided that today I might be brave or foolhardy enough to share some of my latest photographic endeavours:

My Board on Antique Sewing Machines

My Board on Antique Writing Boxes

My Board on Antique Brassware

Feel free to poke around and look at the photographs I’ve taken and leave comments and feedback. Sharing my collection with the world is just as much fun as looking at it and using it.

16/09/2013 by scheong

Staples of Village Life – Craftsmen and Professions of Old

Most of us will have heard this old nursery-rhyme:

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three men in a tub,
And who do you think they be?

The butcher!
The baker!
The candlestick maker!

And they all set out to sea…

For centuries, most people did not live in cities. Mostly because it wasn’t practical and wasn’t safe. Crime, disease, overcrowding, the absence of sanitation and low employment made cities generally undesirable places to live. And the majority of people lived in the country, either on farms, in castles, or in villages or towns nearby. And for centuries, from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 400s, right up to the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s, life carried on like this, virtually unchanged for over a thousand years.

But no matter whether you lived within stone’s throw of a castle, in a country town somewhere, or in one of the few cities of any significant size, no civilised settlement at all was possible without certain tradesmen, craftsmen and professionals setting up shop first.

In this posting, we’ll have a look at some of the staple occupations in society which were necessary, for hundreds of years, for any community to flourish, grow, or even to just survive!

The Blacksmith

What’s the most important craftsman of all? The baker for the bread? The butcher for meat? The carpenter? Stonemason? The chandler? Farrier? Farmer? Miller?

None of the above.

Not for nothing is the Blacksmith known as the King of Craftsmen.

For centuries, until the 1800s, civilised life was impossible without the aid of one man. The blacksmith. On his broad, muscular shoulders rested the trades and crafts and services of all others. A lumberjack could fell, split and carve no trees without an axe and saw. A farmer grew no vegetables without a fork and shovel. The carpenter sawed no wood, screwed no screws, and couldn’t nail two planks together without the blacksmith. The blacksmith made the nails!

Ever since antiquity, the blacksmith, or the ‘village smithy’ was the hub of any community. He made everything from gates, to candlesticks, nails, screws, chains, axeheads, swords, saws, hammers, chisels and horseshoes.

The Forge

The blacksmith’s home was his FORGE. A forge is not only the building where he works, but specifically, the enormous firebox which is the heart of his world. Fueled by charcoal and powered by bellows, a blacksmith could not do a thing without his forge.

The forge was required to heat metal (usually iron) until it was hot and soft enough to be worked by the smith. Red hot iron was not good enough for anything. For it to be malleable enough, it was usually heated until yellow hot. White hot metal was usually too soft and sparkly to be of any use when working.

The Anvil and Vice

Every good blacksmith needed an anvil. Originally made of stone, most later anvils, of the kind used by Wil-E-Coyote for everything apart from smithing, were made of iron.

An Annotated Anvil

The picture above is of a typical blacksmith’s anvil. The horn and shoulder were used for bending, curving and curling metal. The step or table was also used for bending metal. The face was a general-purpose working-area, used as an impact-surface for hammer-blows.

On the face are the Hardie Hole and the Pritchel Hole. These two holes are used for slotting in various smithing-tools, such as wedges or splitters, over which the hot piece of iron was hammered and split, broken, cut or otherwise modified during its transformation. The heel, just like all other sharp edges on the anvil (the step and the edges of the face) was used to bend and shape the hot metal.

The Anvil and Vice

Accompanying the anvil was its little brother, the lesser-known blacksmith’s tool called a vice. The vice is like any other vice that you might have bolted to your workbench at home. The only difference here is that it’s designed to put up with extremely high temperatures!

The vice was used to hold a piece of metal in a particular position while it was being worked on or modified in some way. The vice was most commonly used in the process of twisting.

The elaborate twisting patterning on this fireplace poker would’ve been achieved by heating the iron yellow-hot, before clamping it in the vice and twisting it around with a pair of tongs to achieve the spiral effect.

The Hammer and Tongs

Every blacksmith needed these two basic tools. The hammer, for pounding out the metal and shaping it, and the tongs, for holding the metal and twisting and bending it. Because smithing is seen as such hard, heavy, dangerous work, done with speed and brute-force, we still have an expression that survives today – going at something “hammer and tongs“.

Seven Skills of Superior Smithing

The Blacksmith was the keystone and hub of the community for centuries. Without him, nothing could happen. He held the entire place together, and every other profession, craft and trade relied on his ability to work his magic on metal for them to do their jobs.

But to be a good blacksmith required a lot of skills. Seven in total. All major projects undertaken by a blacksmith generally involved some or all of these skills.

Skill No. 1. Splitting

The ability to punch and split a hole through bar-stock and pull it apart. You couldn’t get pitchforks without the ability to do this effectively.

Skill No. 2. Punching

Every good blacksmith had to be able to work a punch. That is, to take a punch (block) and drive it through hot metal with his hammer, to create a hole in the metal. This is how the holes in axeheads were made for the shafts, and how sword-hilts were punched open, to slide onto the ends of sword-blades.

Skill No. 3. Curling

No. Not that Canadian thing. Curling is the ability to bend and curl metal into a spiral. This doesn’t serve any practical purpose as such, and is mostly decorative.

Skill No. 4. Jumping Up/Upsetting

The ability to compact one end of bar-stock to make it thicker and denser than the other end. Nail-heads and screw-heads were made this way.

Skill No. 5. Drawing Out/Tapering

Blacksmith nails

Drawing something out involved flattening it and thinning out one end of an item, to literally draw it out and make it longer and thinner. Nails were made this way for centuries.

So far, all these skills can be seen in one common, everyday tool which most men are likely to have lying in their garden sheds.

The crowbar:

One end must be jumped up, then punched and split. Then curled over. The other end must be flattened and drawn out. And both ends must be bent and twisted to give the bar its distinctive crook-shape.

The other two skills are…

Skill No. 6. Twisting

Curling and twisting are more decorative than practical, but they’re still considered essential smithing skills. This is achieved by clamping iron bar-stock or rods (heated to a malleable temperature) in a vice and twisting them around to create the spiral shape. To open up the spirals into the cage-like appearance of the candlesticks above, the top of the twist is beaten down with a hammer, to force the spiral to break and spread apart. The whole item is then left to cool to hold the shape.

While the candlesticks above do look very pretty, there is one serious side to the smithing skill of twisting iron…where do you think all those pretty spirals in your screws used to come from?

Skill No. 7. Fire-Welding/Forge Welding

Blacksmith chain. Every link has been fire-welded shut,
to prevent breakage under heavy strain

Prior to electrical welding and blowtorches, the only way to weld anything at all was to send it to the blacksmith. And welding was a fiddly, tricky and extremely dangerous undertaking.

Welding is literally melting two pieces of metal and fusing them together by heat. Prior to the introduction of modern blowtorches and electrical welders which were capable of extremely accurate, high-temperature precision welding, the only way to do this was to fire-weld or forge-weld something together.

Let’s say you broke your sword. Or the tine on your gardening-fork snapped off. To weld it back on, the broken element, and the main body, had to be heated at the break-points, until they were literally white-hot. Once this phenomenal temperature had been achieved, the broken piece was attached back to the main body. The blacksmith then bashed away at the join with his hammer, melding the metal back together. The extremely high temperatures melted the iron, causing it to run together. Once the temperature dropped, the entire piece would be one whole item again.

The Butcher

Meat was rarely eaten by most people in medieval times. But nevertheless, the village butcher was an important man to have around. But the butcher of old was expected to know a lot more than how much to charge per-pound for sausages. He was expected to know how to make the sausages, how to get the meat, how to clean it, preserve it, sell it and store it!

Meat and the Butcher

A butcher typically handled three types of meat, which would come from cows, sheep, or pigs. From this, you would get…

Pork, bacon, and ham, from a pig.

Various cuts of steak and veal from a cow.

And lamb or mutton from a sheep.

Veal and mutton are not the same as beef and lamb. Veal is taken from young cows, beef from older cows. Mutton is taken from older sheep, lamb from younger sheep. You might be familiar with the expression: “To sell mutton dressed as lamb“, meaning to pass off an inferior product (mutton) as lamb (which was considered a much more expensive product).

Meat and Class

In older times, social status determined not only IF you ate meat (which was rare for the poor), but also WHAT type of eat you ate, if you could get it.

Not only could the wealthy eat meat more often, but they could also get the better cuts of meat. And they could also eat such prized meats as lamb, veal and venison, which were generally out-of-reach of lower classes.

Lamb is the meat of…lambs. Baby sheep. Since sheep were FAR more important as producers of WOOL, to kill a lamb for its meat was considered extremely wasteful, when it could live for years and give you tons of wool. Only someone who could sufficiently compensate the farmer for the loss of his lamb (i.e., someone rich) could afford to eat lamb. Most people ate mutton, which was from the meat of much older sheep, which had been producers of wool (the backbone of the British economy for much of the Middle Ages) for several years.

Similarly, veal was the meat of young cows. Since cows were far more important as producers of milk, killing a cow before it could produce milk was considered extravagant and wasteful. And only someone who had enough money to recompense the farmer for his extremely expensive loss, would be able to eat it.

Butchering an Animal

These days, most butchers just sell meat. But in older times, a butcher had to be able to do all kinds of things with meat, and had to be familiar with the entire butchering process. Let’s use a pig as an example.

Once a pig had been sent to the Great Pigsty in the Sky…the one with the solid gold slops-trough and diamond-encrusted hog-oiler…the butcher had to get to work.

A pig is a good example because virtually every part of a pig can be eaten, apart from its squeal. Here’s how it’s done…

First, the hog is sliced open. And all the innards are removed. This stuff is typically called “pluck”, because it’s literally the first part of the animal which is “plucked” from the body. Don’t throw that away. It’s good eatin’. You’re gonna find out just how good, later on.

Next, pork comes off. Pork comes from the belly of the pig, nice and close to the ground. The fatty, juicy meat that tastes so damn good when you roast it.

Further up on the sides and on top of the pig is…bacon! Good for breakfast, and good for EpicMealTime (baconstips’n’baconstrips’n’baconstrips…)

Then, you have the hams! Made up of the hindquarters of the pig, specifically its butt and its gigantic thunder-thighs…otherwise called legs of ham!

Everything on a pig can be eaten. Even the head. Even the ears!

Ever heard of the expression “Brains and Brawn“?

“Brains” are…Pig’s brains.

“Brawn” is the meat which is boiled off of a pig’s head. Mmmm.

Now back to them innards. Delicious, warm innards. Here, the intestines are flushed out with hot water and gotten nice and clean. What for?

Well, among other things – sausages.

And, until the invention of rubber – Condoms!

Remember folks. Prevention is the best cure. Next time you pick up that roast for dinner, ask your butcher for a pack of organic, all-natural pig-gut condoms!

Treating the Meat

The animal has been dispatched, disemboweled, and dissected. Now what?

Unless a butcher had a huge family, or was throwin’ a block-party, it was unlikely that an entire pig was eaten before it went bad (after roughly a week or so).

To ensure a pig was good for eatin’ for a long, long time…it had to be preserved or treated. There were a number of ways to do this.

1. Freezing

If the weather was right, you could pack the carcass with ice and freeze it. Freezing kills microbes and preserves the meat.

2. Salting

If the weather wasn’t right, but you had a lot of money, you could salt your pork, and bacon, and ham, by coating it in huge amounts of salt, or soaking it in brine (salt-water solution). But you needed a lot of money to do this – salt was expensive. Even today, we still have the word ‘salary‘. Salting dries out the meat, which prevents rotting. Ever wondered why bacon is so damn salty?

3. Smoking

You don’t have money? Perhaps you can smoke the meat? Stick it on a hook and hoist it up the nearest chimney (usually in the kitchen fireplace). The smoke from the wood burning far below would coat and cure the meat and give it a nice, smoky flavour. It also dries it out, which prevents rotting.

4. Candying

Can’t kindle a flame? You could try candying. Candying is a bit like pickling. But instead of drenching the food in vinegar, you smother it in…HONEY! Honey is a natural preservative, and it lasts literally for centuries…provided that it’s not contaminated. Archaeologists have dug up jars of Egyptian honey which are thousands of years old…and still good for eating!

Caution: Honey is also a natural laxative. After eating that candied ham sandwich, you better have a toilet nearby.

What about the Rest?

When food was so scarce and hard to preserve, literally no part of the animal went to waste. The butcher would’ve saved the hog’s hairs to make brushes (the first toothbrushes were made of pig-hair). He would’ve fried the ears and eaten them for dinner. Even the pig’s FEET were good for something! Boiled over, and over, and over again, strained, refined and reduced, they produced gelatin. Flavour it with fruit-juice, and you got…jelly!

Anything else that was left over was ground up, chopped up, minced, and forced through the intestines, twisted up, boiled…and sold as sausages!…or condoms.

Soon, the only thing left were the bones. And you might even use those for something if you wanted to be really thrifty. How about soup?

The Role of the Butcher

As you can see, the butcher was an important fellow. Every village had to have one. Or, a farmer had to learn how to do his own butchering. And as you can see, there was a lot to learn! Butchers didn’t just work on pigs. They worked on cows, chickens, and sheep as well. Geese, ducks, swans even! And for the extremely wealthy – deer. Only the king, and those who had earned his majesty’s good favours, were permitted to hunt and eat deer. Anyone else was charged with poaching – and faced the death penalty. And for centuries, a person’s ability to eat deer was considered a GREAT privilege.

Who wants venison?

The Baker

Throughout the western world for centuries, bread was THE staple food. Made of oats, rice, barley or wheat, when you could get it, you’d eat up to five pounds (about 9.75kg) of the stuff every day. But then, you spent that day spliting wood, furrowing fields, planting seeds, felling trees, herding sheep, milking cows, smashing away in your forge, weaving, grinding, sewing, dipping…you certainly needed the calories!

The baker was the fellow who made the bread, in his bakery.

Bakers were important staples of village life for centuries. In the days before imported food from around the country, which didn’t happen until the 1800s, everything you ate was made locally. Including the bread.

Bakers had all kinds of tricks up their sleeves. Flour was purchased from the village miller. And flour was expensive. So the baker did absolutely EVERYTHING to get the most out of his expensive flour that he could.

Bread dough was stretched (adulterated) with everything from the horrific (building-plaster!), to the mundane (sawdust), to the everyday (rice-grains).

To make bread rise, brewers yeast was used. Or if yeast was not available…apple-trees. Apples have natural yeast in them. Sticking a rising loaf of bread under a tree meant that the yeast in the apple-skins seeped into the dough, causing it to rise.

Bread wasn’t just made from wheat-flour. Wheat, especially in the Middle Ages, was expensive! It was usually taken by the lord, or the king, as part of his taxes. So most bread was made of barley, rye, oats or rice.

But even here, the baker tried to squeeze every last penny out of every loaf.

To ensure that nobody could accuse him of being dishonest (yeah, right…), the baker always baked thirteen loaves of bread (the ‘baker’s dozen’). That way, nobody could accuse him of cheating them, or shortchanging them. Which is probably just as well, because his conniving ways didn’t stop there.

Baking Bread

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake,
Baker’s Man,
Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
Pat it, and prick it, and mark it with a B,
And put it in the oven for Baby and Me!

For centuries, you couldn’t bake at home. Most people had fireplaces at home. But not ovens. If you wanted to bake bread, you took it to the village baker, who baked it for you, and marked it with your initials, as in the rhyme, so that you would be assured of getting your loaf or cake, or pie, returned to you.

But how do you bake without temperature-control?

First, the oven (which is a huge, brick cave), is filled with wood and set on fire. The oven is allowed to get really hot, and the fire must fill the entire oven. Then, once the fire is burned down, the ashes are raked out, the pies and loaves are stuffed in, and a door, soaked in water (so that it swells and creates a seal, and so that it doesn’t burst into flames) is stuffed over the entrance of the oven. Spare bread-dough is used to further seal the entrance and prevent the escape of heat.

A medieval-style oven heating up, with the door open

The bread is now left to bake. It’s done when the dough on the door is also baked. There’s no temperature control, but at least you have a timer, of sorts!

Once the bread is ready, it’s removed from the oven.

But ovens aren’t very clean. A baker wasn’t going to spend all day sweeping the ashes out of his oven, before he shoved in the dough. By the time he did that, he’d lose all the heat, and the bread wouldn’t bake properly.

As a result, fresh bread always had a slightly burnt, black, crusty underside, from where it contacted the bottom of the oven.

The loaves were cut horizontally. The cheaper, burnt undercrusts were sold to the poor and the peasantry who considered themselves lucky to have them. The upper crusts were given to the the lord and his friends up at the manor house.

Another way that the baker made the most out of his flour.

To make up for his bad reputation, it probably helped that the baker had a good sense of humor. Or perhaps, it was better for his customers to have a good sense of humor. Because the baker liked to play practical jokes on people. Like filling trick-pies full of live animals and having them explode out of the crust, and fly and run and scamper all over the dinner-table!…like four and twenty blackbirds…

The Candlestick Maker

While it was the blacksmith who made the candleholders, it was up to the village chandler to make the actual candlesticks, an essential component of life for hundreds of years.

Candles were typically made in one of two ways: Dip-candling, and mold-candling.

The typical, long, slender candlesticks which we all know and love are made by the chandler using one of three different materials:

Beeswax.

Paraffin wax.

Tallow.

Paraffin wax or beeswax produces the best candles. Clean-burning and bright. Tallow is a cheap, fatty byproduct, used to make cheap, fatty candles. They don’t burn very well and they smoke like an opium-addict. Remember how the butcher had to get the most out of every animal he slaughtered? Any leftover fat (tallow), would’ve been sold to the village chandler.

Candlesticks are made out of cotton or woolen wicks constantly dipped in and out of pools of wax or tallow, and left to dry momentarily after every dipping. Usually, whole racks of wicks were dipped at once – an early form of mass-production. Once the candles had achieved an optimum thickness, the wicks were trimmed and the candles were put on sale.

Fatter, thicker pillar-candles were made by sticking the wicks into molds, and pouring molten wax into the molds and letting the wax cool and harden. Then, the mold was opened and the finished candle was removed.

Ever burnt yourself with molten wax? It hurts. A lot.

Being a chandler could be a hazardous business.

Nevertheless, the village candle-maker was an extremely important person. Although he also had to be experienced – wax was expensive and could not be wasted. But fortunately, wax is also infinitely recyclable.

The Brewster

Butcher, baker, candlestick maker, blacksmith…all jobs done by men.

Perhaps surprisingly, brewing beer was one of the few jobs carried out solely (or at least, chiefly) by women!

Remember how I said that most people lived in small communities and avoided big cities?

One of the reasons for this was because there was nothing to drink! Water was often far too polluted to even bathe in, let alone drink! So instead of drinking water, most people drank ale, or beer. And the lady who made this beverage was the brewster.

Believe it or not, beer is responsible for large gatherings of people. And not just for drunken school and university parties. But beer was often the only beverage that was safe to drink, for centuries! The “legal drinking age” was whenever your kids stopped sucking on breastmilk! Yep – even kids drank beer. There was even a low-alcohol beer made specifically for them!

The brewster was responsible for making ale and beer for her menfolk and kiddies. Brewsters could often make a tidy little business out of this. While hubby worked at the smithy, or the butchery, or felled trees, she supplemented the household income by supplying the village pub with its staple beverage! And because brewing doesn’t require any serious exertion of force, unlike a blacksmith, butcher or baker, it was ideal for older women! Yep – in the old days, social security for widows meant brewing beer!

The main ingredients of any beer are water, malted barley, yeast and hops, all things which were readily available to people living in small villages surrounded by farms.

But why drink beer?

Well, one of the key components in making beer is boiling water. Water has to be heated before it can be used to make beer. Unknown for centuries, heating water kills off bacteria – that’s why beer was safe to drink! And why straight water, often unboiled, was unsafe to drink.

Although this connection between boiling water and killing bacteria was not made until the 1800s, people back then knew that there was something about the brewing process that meant that it was a damn sight safer to drink beer than water!

Or, if you wanted to be real safe – drink wine, which has no water in it at all.

The Miller

The village miller, cooped up in his windmill, or watermill, was the chap in town who ground your wheat, oats, barley, dried corn, rye or other grain into flour.

And he was loathed as much as he was loved.

At best, people would tolerate a miller. At worst, he was a social outcast.

The reason for this was because the miller controlled the village mill. And the mill was the only place for miles around where grains could be ground to flour. And if you didn’t like the rates that the miller charged per-sack for grinding up your wheat – Tough!

Try and find someone else! We dare you!

Ah. You couldn’t, huh? You come crawling back, huh?

Yeah.

That’s why nobody liked the miller.

Of course, this wasn’t always the case, but in the days of feudalism, when the only mill in a given community was owned by the Lord of the Castle, millers were certainly not going to win any popularity contests held on the village square anytime soon. On top of everything else, he was allowed to keep a percentage of any quantity of grain that he milled!

The miller was also one of the wealthier men around town, for rather obvious reasons. And he had the house with the riverside views. And fresh water.

As much as people tended to have love-hate relationships with their local miller, if he was a decent sort of person, for a reasonable fee, he would take a load off your back, and speed up one of your most boring, mind-numbing, backbreaking chores – the “daily grind” – which was literally where the term originated from – the boring, monotonous grinding of quern-stones (milling-stones) to crush wheat into flour.

04/07/2012 by Scheong

The Land of the Free: America’s Immigrant History

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Ever since it was colonised by the master of colonial powers back in the Stuart era, the United States has been a land of immigration, innovation and industry. Those immortal words, part of a poem by writer Emma Lazarus, have adorned the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor for over a century, since they were first put there in 1903. They poetically remind us of America’s great immigrant past.

America. The United States. The U.S. The Arsenal of Democracy. The global policeman who Theodore Roosevelt said should: “Speak softly and carry a big stick”.

Empires and their influences rise and fall, whether or not they be empires in the truest sense of the word, or not. The Chinese Empire. The Russian Empire. The Soviet Empire. The Greek Empire. The Roman Empire. The Japanese Empire. The French Empire. The Byzantine Empire…the list is almost endless. But right now, one could argue that we are in the midst of an American Empire.

At the time of the British Empire, British influence and culture spread throughout the world…much like how today, American influence and culture does the same. The British brought us language, culture, food, government, schools and tray after tray of delicately-sliced, daintily-prepared cucumber sandwiches. The Americans gave us trash-talk TV shows, Oprah, supermodels, shamelessly expensive designer consumer-goods and a plethora of cheap, fattening, greasy fast foods the likes of which have never been seen or tasted before.

One could say a lot of bad things about America. But then one could say a lot of bad things about almost any country on earth. But America’s history is one of constant hardship, struggle, invention, innovation, creativity, renewal and grudging acceptance.

So. Where do we begin?

Finding the New World

People have been aware of the American continent for centuries. Ever since the late 15th century. Everyone knows that in 1492, an Italian man named Christopher Columbus sailed across the Pond. He reached the other bank and he found a great, vast, untouched country. He called it!…

…India.

Columbus was looking for a passage to India and the Middle East. He hadn’t counted on bumping into a huge landmass halfway through his journey. But he did. And since he was looking for India, he assumed that this was India! For that reason, he named the natives who came to greet him…Indians.

They’re not, of course. But today, the term “American Indian” still survives. All because of a simple geographical error.

Eventually, the American continent became known as the “New World”, to differentiate it from the “Old World” (ie: Europe).

Knowledge of this “New World” had been around for a while. In 1583, a fellow named Humphrey Gilbert, from England, found a new landmass off the coast of the American continent. He claimed it for Queen and Country (‘Queen’ being Elizabeth I) and gave it a name which we still have today. His newfound landmass would be named…um…

Newfoundland.

Yeah, they weren’t very big on fancy, inventive, creative names back in Tudor times.

Attempts to colonise America had been around for a while. A lot of countries wanted to go to America. France, Spain and England particularly, were all fighting for their own slices of this new action. The first successful British colony was established in 1607 during the reign of King James the First.

Jamestowne, Virginia: A Shaky Start

In the early 1600s, a group of daring colonists set sail across the Atlantic. Backing them up was the Virginia Company of London. This company was established purely for the purposes of setting up a British colony, or set of colonies, on the American continent. Many people had tried in the past, but all of them had been failures for one reason or another. But in 1607, they succeeded! Yay!

They named their new settlement Jamestown. And the land around them they named ‘Virginia’, after the company that sponsored their little adventure. They built huts, set up palisades, grew crops, sold discount DVDs…everything was cool!

…or not.

The colonists needed to choose the site of their new settlement very carefully. Somewhere with wood for building and for fuel, somewhere close to water for drinking, and water-transport, somewhere clean and comfortable, and somewhere free from the savage natives!

To this end, they selected a spot in the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia, near the mouth of the aptly-named James River. It was perfect! The peninsula was created by the convergence of two waterways. The James River on the south, the North River on the…um…north…lots of lovely land to the west, and to the east, Chesapeake Bay!

But, best of all these things…there were no savage natives around! wonderful! Perfect! Fantastic!

They thought this was so fantastic that they completely forgot to take into account…WHY…there were no savage natives around.

What at first seemed like the perfect place to set up shop soon became a nightmare. The reason there were no natives here was because it was a terrible place to be. And when the locals don’t go there, it’s best that you don’t, either.

The area had a lot of stagnant, still water all over the place, because of the huge amounts of water from the two rivers that emptied into the bay. This stagnant, stale water was impossible to drink. And it bred mosquitoes that buzzed around all over the place! The ground was so wet and soggy from the nearby waterways that it was impossible to grow anything there. The crops would become waterlogged and just rot in the ground. And what land that there was actually available for settlement was so small that it was considered a waste of time to even try starting!

Just about everything was against them. Too late to go out finding somewhere else to sleep for the night, the colonists had to make do with whatever their poor choice had given them to do whatever they needed to do, with. And that wasn’t much.

To set up a colony, the menfolk would have to chop down trees, de-branch logs, cut planks or beams, or cut notches in tree-trunks to create logs and somehow build simple wooden or log-cabins. They also had to clear land, plow fields and grow crops!

Can you do that?

Neither could they!

The problem was that they’d arrived in America too late in the year. By the time they’d managed to get their settlement together, such as it was, it was already the middle of May, 1607, and rapidly approaching June. The issue here was that there wouldn’t be enough time to plant crops and get them to grow to a sufficient size to harvest for food, before winter came and killed everything!

On top of that, there was not a single farmer amongst them. They were all merchants, tradesmen, gentlemen of means, ladies of leisure, children, and household domestic servants. Even those who were used to hard work could chop wood or cook food or wash clothes. But farming?

They didn’t have a clue.

Conditions got so bad that soon they were all starving. During the 1600s, the world goes through what is called the “Mini Ice Age”, which doesn’t end until the early 1800s. Temperatures get so cold that in England, it’s not uncommon for the River Thames in the very heart of London to freeze over! You could skate from one bank of the river to the other! Or even take a sleigh and horses, because the ice is that thick!

What does this mean for the colonists?

Well, with harsh winter weather, little food and less firewood, they begin dropping like flies. Of the original five hundred colonists, by the end of 1607, there are only 449 left! And by the end of 1610, there’s only 61 left!

The colonists were in really bad shape. Even if they wanted to start farming, they couldn’t, because they didn’t have the skills necessary to do it. The local natives did try to help them out, but local assistance only goes so far. Soon, the colonists were fighting with the Indians. Not a good idea. Mostly because the Indians are armed with bows and arrows, and the colonists with unreliable matchlock muskets. What’s the issue here?

Well, while the bow and arrow is an older technology, it operates at a much, much faster rate of fire than the muskets of the time. In the end, the colonists capture the daughter of the local chieftain and hold her to ransom. The war ends and they sign a peace treaty. But the Indian girl is kinda cute, so one of the colonists marries her and takes her back to England as a sort of walking advertisement for exotic life in the New World. Her name becomes famous all over London.

Pocahontas.

Her husband was John Rolfe, one of the first successful tobacco farmers in colonial America. They sailed for England in 1616. They would’ve sailed back home to America in 1619 at the end of their tour of England, but Pocahontas died before they could make the journey.

Jamestown struggled on for several more decades. But it was finally abandoned at the close of the 17th century, in 1699.

The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony

The other famous group of settlers in early American history were a group of persecuted religious types. Known today as the Pilgrim Fathers, or simply, the Pilgrims, these English men, women and children followed the Christian puritan religion.

And they weren’t exactly popular for doing so.

Just as the name suggests, the puritans believed in leading…pure lives. This meant that religion was central to their way of acting, living and thinking. Puritans believed that many of the things that we take for granted today, were sinful in the eyes of the Lord, and should be illegal. Things like: Christmas, gambling, games, sport, presents and theater! No wonder they weren’t exactly popular…

So persecuted were they that the puritans decided to leave England and sail for the New World. And they did so on one of the most famous ships in history.

The Mayflower.

Fed up of the trouble and persecution caused by King Charles the First in England, the puritans decided that they had to escape. To this end, they boarded a ship at the English port town of Plymouth, and set sail due west, for the American continent.

The Mayflower might be famous, but it wouldn’t be my first choice for a transatlantic crossing.

The ship was tiny. About 30m long by 7.5m wide (110 x 25ft), with four decks. The space between the decks was about five feet high! Crammed into this bathtub with sails were about 130 passengers and crew. About 105 passengers, and about 25 to 30 sailors. If that sounds crowded, then be glad the ship didn’t leave with it’s original, full complement of 150 passengers and crew! About twenty passengers got off the ship when it docked at Plymouth, and refused to get back on. On top of this, the ship was not designed to transport people! It was a merchant vessel. A cargo-ship designed to transport barrels of wine!

The Mayflower left England on the 16th of September, 1620. And they were probably glad to be on their way! Two previous attempts to leave, with another ship along for the ride (the ‘Speedwell‘) had been marred by misfortune. The Speedwell sprung a leak on both previous attempts, and the ships had to keep turning back to England. Originally supposed to leave with two ships from the famous English port of Southampton, the pilgrims now left with one ship, from the port city of Plymouth, England. But finally, they were on their way.

The voyage took sixty-six days across the Atlantic. They arrived along the Eastern coast of the American continent in what is modern day Massachusetts. It is the 9th of November, 1620. They dropped anchor, lowered the ship’s boats and rowed ashore. Landfall was made on a large, smooth grey rock on the Massachusetts shoreline. Today, this unassuming chunk of stone is called Plymouth Rock.

Or is it?

The traditional story is that the Mayflower left England, beat a path across the sea, dropped anchor off the American coast, lowered its boats, the passengers and crew rowed ashore and the first of their feet hit American soil, standing on a large rock on the beach. But is it true? Nobody really knows. No accounts written by the pilgrims back in the 1620s make any mention of a rock of any kind. The first written record of it ever existing didn’t show up until the mid-18th century, ca. 1741.

The man responsible for this was Thomas Faunce. Faunce, by then nearly a hundred years old (to be precise, the incredible age of 94!), had been town record-keeper of Plymouth, Massachusetts, for most of his life. It was he who identified the rock which, so his father had told him, was the actual ‘Plymouth Rock’ which the Pilgrims first touched when they arrived in America.

Whether or not it’s 100% true is up for debate. But in America today, you can still go to Massachusetts and see Plymouth Rock. It’s still there, housed in its own special little protective structure by the sea.

Just like the settlers at Jamestown, the Pilgrims had to fight to survive. To try and make this easier, they wrote and signed the first proper legal document in American history. The Mayflower Compact.

The details of the compact listed the laws, rules and regulations which were expected within the colony, and which all signers were sworn to follow and obey, in order for the colony to have the best chance of survival.

The actual Compact is long gone. But copies of what it probably looked like have survived to this day, preserved in the texts of books written and printed shortly after the arrival of the pilgrims. The text of the Compact, as recorded in various contemporary papers and books from the period, read as follows. (The spelling and grammar is modern, but the text is unchanged from the original document):

The Text of the Mayflower Compact (1620)

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620

Despite this nice piece of paper and all that it entails (it takes a while to cut through the incredibly convoluted nature of 17th century English, but it’s not that hard to read and understand!), life for the Pilgrims in Massachusetts was no easier than that for the settlers at Jamestown. Disease and starvation killed several people before the end of the year.

By 1621, the colony of New Plymouth begins to take shape properly. Local native Americans make friends with the pilgrims. They show them where to fish, how to fertilise the local soil so that their crops of corn will grow. The pilgrims hunt for turkeys with their muskets.

In November, 1621, one year after their arrival, the pilgrims hold a feast to show their thanks for God’s mercy, and to show their appreciation to the local natives who had helped them survive their first twelve months in this new and alien world. Today, it is the American holiday of Thanksgiving.

The pilgrims and the Jamestown settlers become America’s first permanent English-speaking settlers.

Other Colonists

Early America wasn’t just colonised by the British. Great swathes of the country were colonised by the French, the Dutch and the Spanish, to the south, north and west respectively. You can still see their influences in the place-names today: Louisiana – named for King Louis of France, Vermont – French for ‘Green Mountains’ and the original name of the New York Borough of Manhattan: New Amsterdam.

The Great Migrations

In the period before and after the American Civil War (1861-1865), there were periods of mass migration. The first migration came from within: African-Americans held in slavery in the South fled North. Racism existed everywhere, but in the North, people were generally more tolerant, open, respectful and less prejudiced.

One of the greatest numbers of migrants to the United States were the Chinese.

Fleeing famine and unrest in China, thousands of them swarmed across the Pacific Ocean to American port-cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. In the 1860s, America is attempting the world’s first transcontinental railroad. Irish railroad workers refuse to do the backbreaking and incredibly dangerous work of boring, blasting, shoveling, tunneling, laying sleepers, gravel, tracks and driving in millions of rivets and spikes. The Railroad is made in an age where old-fashioned gunpowder (‘black powder’) is still the main explosive. Of only moderate effectiveness, the only other alternative is the highly unstable nitroglycerin. It’s so dangerous that it can explode at the drop of a hat. Transporting it is made illegal, and even under controlled circumstances, accidents are common.

The Chinese, lured to the United States by stories of work, money and a stable life, flock to California. Some have already been there since the 1850s when the California Gold Rush spread gold-fever around the world. To this day, San Francisco boasts the biggest Chinatown in the entire United States. One of the most famous Chinese foodstuffs which isn’t Chinese at all, is created there – The fortune-cookie.

The other great migration came from the 1840s onwards. Driven from their homeland by constant crop-failures, the Irish people are starving to death because their staple food is almost nonexistent. During this time, the diet of the Irish poor is made up mostly of beer, bread, cheese and that wonder-crop…the potato.

Yes. The Irish are the world’s biggest per-capita consumer of french fries.

When the Potato Blights started in the 1840s, Irish families starved. Farmers were unable to farm and with no potatoes to sell at market, they were unable to pay rent. And this got them in trouble with the absentee landlords – Wealthy Englishmen who owned estates in Ireland. Called ‘absentee landlords’ because they never bothered to visit their Irish estates. They only paid attention to them when the money stopped flowing, which happened more and more as the 1800s progressed. Poor Irish families were evicted, and landlords would even burn down their houses to stop them from coming back.

The Irish fled to the United States in their thousands. They settled in the big cities and in small towns, blending in with American society.

As the 1800s progressed, more and more people poured into the United States, the oft-toted ‘Land of the Free’. The majority of people living in America today can boast some degree of European immigrant history.

Immigration in America grew from a trickle, to the occasional rush, to a steady flow, into a torrent of humanity, forcing their way in. To regulate the flow of immigrants, the American Government established the world’s most famous immigration check-point in history. This place:

Ellis Island Immigration Center, New York, U.S.A.

As far back as 1855, the United States had been processing immigrants through official arrival-centers. On the Eastern Seaboard, the main one was the Castle Garden Immigration Center.

Previously a defensive fort built on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, Castle Garden (today Castle Clinton) Immigration Center was America’s first immigration-center. The castle or fort had existed since 1808, it became an immigration-center in 1855. It remained one for nearly forty years.

But Castle Garden was not fully-equipped to be an immigration-center. It didn’t have all the proper facilities and it was located on the increasingly crowded Manhattan Island. It was decided that there had to be a PROPER immigration-center, purpose-built for the processing of immigrants.

Ellis Island Immigration Center started operation in 1892. It finally closed in 1954. By the time it ceased to be a functioning immigration-center, it had processed 12,000,000 people.

Today, over 100,000,000 Americans can trace their family history back to someone who passed through the gates at Ellis Island.

Who Came to Ellis Island?

The majority of people who came to the United States through the immigration-center at Ellis island were Europeans. Swiss, Swedes, Spanish, Germans, Poles, French, and as the 20th century dawned, a large number of Eastern European, mostly Russian, Jews. The pogroms (race riots) in the Russian Empire at the time forced many Jews to flee Eastern Europe for their own safety. Some merely moved to other countries within Europe, such as Poland, or Germany, or France. Some moved to the United Kingdom. But more and more were willing to risk everything on a third-class ticket to the New World.

To sail across ‘The Pond’ on a total guess was a big step. Most of these people were going to a totally new country. A country they probably only read about in newspapers, in books, or heard about from friends, or read about in letters. This legendary country called ‘America’, where the streets were paved with gold and where anybody could make it big!

The Immigration Process at Ellis Island

In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, great steamship companies such as Cunard, White Star, French Line, the Hamburg-America Line and so-forth, the big, transatlantic companies, got a lot of their money, not from the wealthy first-class passengers who swanned across the Pond in lavish style and luxury, but rather from the hundreds and thousands of poor European immigrants who fled their homelands to try their luck in the New World, this land of the free, the home of the brave.

To get from Europe to America was a voyage of at least a week. Even the fastest ships could only manage it in about six or seven days (even today, modern ocean-liners will take up to four days). But what happened when the ship reached New York?

The ship would sail into New York Harbor, past the great Statue of Liberty, the first sight of America that any of these immigrants was ever likely to see. Passing the Statue, they would sail past the Five Boroughs to New Jersey. Here, they were offloaded, and they and their luggage were dumped onto ferries. Ferries ran shuttle-services to and from Ellis Island, off the southwest coast of Manhattan.

Once you reached the island, you were shepherded off and sent to the main immigration-hall. Here, your luggage was stacked, and then you headed upstairs to the Great Hall. The hall was broken up by steel and wooden barriers, long benches and barricades. You selected the appropriate line, got into it, and worked your way down towards the desks at the far end. Here, your papers would be examined and cross-checked, such as passports, tickets, visas and so-forth. Interpreters speaking the main European languages were on-hand to assist with any language-barriers.

If everything checked out, you went onto other lines and categories. You would be medically examined, your intelligence checked, and starting in 1919, your literacy as well. This process could take hours…or it could take months! In the end, one of three things would eventually happen:

1. You were passed fit for immigration. You could gather up your luggage from the luggage-room downstairs, and then head to the “Kissing Post”.

The ‘Kissing Post’ was given its current name because this was the exit-passageway from the main immigration-hall. It was where friends, family-members or sponsors waited for their newly-arrived companions or additional family-members. Couples, families and friends would meet here in the passageway, head outside and board a ferry for New York, ready to start their new lives in their new home.

2. You were put into Quarantine.

Not everyone who came to Ellis Island could leave right away. If you were found to be ill, or lacking in any physical or mental capacity, you might be refused entry to the United States, or you might be put into quarantine. Medical officers, nurses, orderlies and doctors prowled the floors of the immigration-center, examining new arrivals. Every single immigrant was given a quick (and I mean QUICK! Less than a minute!) checkup by a doctor to assess their condition. If there were no issues, the person could pass through. If there were, a chalk-mark would be pressed into their clothes. The marks that the medical-officers on Ellis Island employed included:

B – Back (Potential back-problems, spinal problems, etc).
C- Conjunctivitis (Pink-eye. An infection of the eye).
T – Trachoma (another type of eye-infection)
E – Eyes (for potential vision-issues).
F – Face (for potential facial issues).
FT – Feet (for issues with feet, walking, mobility, etc).
G – Goiter.
H – Heart.
K – Hernia (ouch!)
L – Lameness.
N – Neck.
P – Physical (general medical issues).
PG – Pregnancy.
S – Senility or Alzheimer’s Disease.
SC – Scalp and hair issues.
SI – ‘Special Inquiry’.
X – Suspected Mental Illness.
(X) – Certified mental illness.

Depending on the mark made on your clothes, you could be held in quarantine for days, or even weeks at a time, until you were cured. Ellis Island had playgrounds for children, dining-halls, a hospital and dormitories for all its quarantined immigrants. Once you were cured, you would be allowed to leave the island.

3. You were sent back to your home country.

This was the last and worst category that an immigrant could find himself in. You could be sent back to Europe for any number of reasons, from criminal records, not having enough money, or a sponsor (the immigration officials didn’t want people surviving on handouts!) or an unsatisfactory medical report. For many immigrants, being sent back was devastating. Many of them had sunk their life-savings into packing everything up and shipping their family across the Atlantic to the United States to start a new life. The only good thing to come out of this was the fact that the passage back home was free!

Returning immigrants didn’t have to pay for their passage home. It was provided by the steamship company that brought them there in the first place. Because the big liner companies didn’t like giving free passages to immigrants, the immigration process was very strict. Before you even got on the ship departing from Cherbourg, Naples or Southampton, Hamburg or Gdansk, you went through strict immigration processes, as tightly controlled, if not more so, than the one you would get at Ellis Island. This was to ensure that only the best candidates for worthwhile immigration ever made it through, saving everyone time and money.

Of course, some people wanted to get to America at any cost. If their medical examination was unsatisfactory, it wasn’t uncommon for people to wipe off the chalk-marks made on their clothes…or simply take off their clothes, or turn them inside out…and sneak off to the departure area, grab their luggage and board the next ferry leading to the mainland. They’d come this far and sunk all their money into this once-in-a-lifetime chance. They weren’t about to let a stupid white mark on their coat hold them back!

The End of Ellis Island

For sixty two years, Ellis Island was in operation. From 1892, until 1954. Business was steady for about half that time, and over twelve million people entered America through this most famous of all the immigration centers. Ellis Island was busiest between the 1890s up to the period after the First World War. In 1920, immigration restriction acts in many countries saw the end of the transatlantic immigrant trade, and ships from big companies like Cunard, the French Line and the White Star Line, stopped offering cheap berths to immigrants. The ‘steerage’ class on ocean-liners practically disappeared and was converted into a more respectable-sounding “Tourist Class” instead.

Despite the decline of the transatlantic immigrant-passages, Ellis Island remained open until well into the postwar years. It finally shut down in 1954.

Famous Ellis Island Immigrants

A lot of America’s most famous celebrities came to the United States by passing through the gates of Ellis Island. Among them were…

Irving Berlin – The famous songwriter.
Isaac Asimov – The novelist.
Chef Boiardi.
Frank Carpa – The film-director.
Cary Grant and Bob Hope (The famous actor and comedian, both from England).
Al Jolson – ‘The Greatest Entertainer of the 20th Century’.
Gus Kahn – The famous songwriter (from Germany).
Bela Lugosi – The horror actor.
Sgt. Michael Strank – WWII soldier. Raised the flag on Iwo Jima, 1945.
The Family Von Trapp – Made famous in ‘The Sound of Music‘.

America’s Immigrant History

America’s history is one of immigration. One of travel, escape, renewal, of multiculturalism and mingling. Without hundreds of millions of people daring to take the trip across the oceans to the New World, America as we know it today would never have existed.

A happy Independence Day to all the Americans reading this blog 😀

03/04/2012 by Scheong

They’re Coming to Take Me Away! – A Compact History of Mental Illness

Mental illness is a horrifying thing. It has had a long, long, long, troubled past, full of superstition, horror, misunderstanding, experimentation, mistreatment, pain, suffering, abuse and conjecture. It’s the stuff of horror movies like “House on Haunted Hill”. For centuries, the mad and insane have suffered, some in silence…others, not so much.

This is the history of madness. A look at how mental illness has been viewed throughout the centuries, and how people attempted to treat it, control it and cure it.

The Nature of Madness

Mental illness has been around for as long as mankind, and for as long as it has existed, there have been explanations for it, reasons for it, cures and treatments for it, whether they be right, wrong, effective, ineffective or just plain crazy!

How far mental illness can be traced is totally unknown. Only since the dawn of the written word and reliable records can we can even begin to guess at how many centuries mental illnesses have existed for, or how far back certain specific illnesses can be traced.

The Cause of Insanity

People have been trying to figure out what caused mental illnesses for as long as they’ve been around. One of the earliest explanations was that it was related to the movements, phases and positions of the Moon. The Latin word ‘Luna’, or ‘Moon’, has given us the words ‘lunacy’ and ‘lunatic’.

Other common beliefs included posession by devils, demons, evil spirits…or that the person was a witch. In the last case, the most expedient ‘cure’ involved a large stake, lots of wood and a burning torch. To deal with ‘evil spirits’ or ‘demons’, the most common ‘cures’ were either an exorcism, or a terrifying operation called a trephination or a trepanning.

Trepanning was the practice of gaining access to the brain by means of making an incision in the organ’s outer casing.

In other words…drilling a hole in your head.

Trepanning is still practiced today, but its benefits (relieving pressure on a damaged and swelling brain) are much better understood now, than they were back in the Middle Ages, when this treatment was used to ‘cure’ insanity and release a person’s demons from their soul.

Trepanning was carried out using one of a variety of drilling or boring tools…such as this delightful instrument:

Stay very still and don’t sneeze…

The procedure was typically carried out in the following manner:

1. The patient was seated (or laid) on a chair or bed and secured in-place (either with straps or with the aid of surgeon’s assistants).
2. The head (or the necessary portion of it), was shaved smooth.
3. A Y-shaped cut was made into the skin, and the skin then peeled back.
4. A mark was made on the bare skull and the drill placed thereon.
5. Start drilling.

Oh…and if you’re the patient, you get the unique firsthand experience of watching everything that happens. Because there’s no anesthetics.

Trepanning was used to treat more regular health-issues, such as migraines, headaches and so-forth, but it was most famously used for the treatment of mental illness.

As folklore, superstition and religion slowly gave way to reason, logic, science and medicine towards the 1700s, a greater understanding was sought of the lunatic. What caused someone to go mad, what they should do with him, how he should be treated and what might happen to him. In Georgian England, the answer lay in one word.

Bedlam.

Or, as it is properly called, the Bethlehem Royal Hospital.

The Bethlehem Royal Hospital, or as it was more commonly called,Bedlam, was…and is (it’s still around today!)…the most famous mental hospital in the world. It’s also one of the oldest. Its existence goes all the way back to the early 14th century, when it was established in 1330.

Like Bedlam

The Royal Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam, was, is, and remains, the world’s most famous mental hospital. Even today, a phrase survives. A place that is rowdy, noisy, out of control and crowded with people is described to be “like Bedlam”. As indeed, the hospital was, during its most famous and notorious period, in the 1700s.

Previous to this time, the inhabitants of Bedlam were referred to as ‘inmates’, as if it was a prison for the mentally ill. In 1700, the inhabitants (also nicknamed ‘Bedlamites’) were called ‘patients’ for the first time. Between 1725-1734, ‘Curable’ and ‘Incurable’ wards were opened, where patients were supposedly housed accordingly. But despite the apparent show of progress, Bedlam was a hellhole.

In the 1500s and 1600s, the hospital was filthy and patient-care was almost nonexistent. Barely anything changed by the Georgian era. Patients were often chained to walls, locked in filthy cells or subjected to brutal ‘treatments’, such as ‘The Chair’.

It didn’t DO anything. You were strapped in an armchair. Tied down. Secured. Then the chair was hoisted up into the air and spun around…and around…and around…and around…and around…It was supposed to punish you for being ‘mad’, hoping that you would repent of your wicked and sinful ways and be an upstanding citizen once more.

Unsurprisingly…it didn’t work. Unless the purpose of the treatment was to make you expel your lunch, that is.

For almost the entirety of the 1700s, Bedlam was a popular tourist-attraction in London. It was common for the wealthy, upwardly mobile classes of British society to take in the sights…and one of them was a trip to the Bedlam Hospital, where, for a small fee, you could be granted admission to the wards. Here, you could view the lunatics and bedlamites and if you wished, you could poke them through the bars of their cells with your walking-stick to watch their reactions. It’s fun, trust me. Bring the kiddies…It should always be a family outing, a trip to a lunatic asylum.

One of the most famous depictions of the Bedlam Hospital is the final painting in a series by Georgian artist, William Hogarth, titled ‘A Rake’s Progress’. Painted in the early 1730s, this is what the notorious lunatic asylum looked like in the 18th century

By the turn of the century and the coming of the Victorian era, views on mental health were (gradually) changing and conditions at Bedlam did eventually improve. Government inquiries, reports and investigations brought to light the shocking conditions inside Bedlam and by the dawn of the 19th century, the regular tours had died away after surviving as a London fixture for nearly a century. The patients were given proper care and attention and the buildings improved.

The Maddest of them All

The most famous mad Georgian of them all was one of the kings who gave his name to the era. King George III. Up to 1788, he was a sharp, intelligent, learned man. He enjoyed science, technology, mechanics, farming and nature. He had a lovely and loving wife and a HUGE family (fifteen children in total!). But from then on, attacks of mental illness eventually robbed him of his senses. He died, blind, deaf and insane, locked in a tower in 1820. When his beloved wife, Queen Charlotte, died in 1818…nobody even bothered to tell him.

Mad Words

The Georgian era gave us a number of our most commonly-used words when describing mental illness – “Crazy”, and “Insane”, from Middle English meaning ‘cracked‘, and from the Latin word ‘Insanus‘ (‘Unhealthy’). ‘Psychiatry‘ as a discipline, was first practiced in 1808, when the word was coined by a German physician, Dr. Johann Christian Reil, from the Greek words meaning “Medical Treatment of the Mind”.

A Victorian View of Madness

Mental illness was not widely understood in Victorian times, but things were gradually improving. The Industrial Revolution made life faster. For the first time, things could truly be mass-produced.

And lunatic asylums were no exception. As a partial list, we have:

The Hanwell County Asylum (built 1830).

The Surrey County Asylum (built 1838).

The Royal Bethlehem Hospital (extended, 1837).

The City of London Lunatic Asylum (opened 1866).

Guy’s Hospital (Lunatic Ward, opened 1844).

The list goes on. And this is just in England.

Thanks largely to reforms at the turn of the century, the Victorian-era lunatic was handled with much greater care, but probably with just as much misunderstanding. Causes, and treatments for, mental illnesses…and indeed, the distinctions between one illness and another…were still very much muddled up. But progress was…slowly…being made.

The increase in number, and size, of asylums and hospitals around the world, as well as the number of patients, caused problems. Although chaining patients up was no longer an acceptable method of restraint, something was needed to stop patients from hurting themselves. If they couldn’t be drugged up with heroin, opium, laudanum and morphine (common Victorian drugs for calming someone down!), then they had to be rendered a negligible force in some other manner.

Its existence predates the Victorian era, but the straightjacket was the most common method.

Invented in 1790 in France, it was first used at the Bicetre Hospital in the southern suburbs of Paris. Bicetre was not a place where you wanted lunatics to run wild. It wasn’t just a hospital. It was a lunatic asylum, a prison and an orphanage as well!

The straightjacket was used regularly on mentally ill patients, even before the Victorian era. It was the only way that badly understaffed mental asylums could control all their patients at once. But a straightjacket isn’t supposed to be worn for a long period of time (restricting the limbs like that causes blood-clots and other nasty things…perhaps why Houdini wanted to break out of them so often). Bicetre Hospital was one of the first mental asylums, along with Bedlam, to introduce humane treatment methods for the mentally ill during the sweeping social and moral reforms that spread around Europe and the United Kingdom in the 1790s.

Research and theorising into the causes and possible treatments of mental illness started in earnest in the 1800s. Pioneers such as the famous Dr. Sigmund Freud, helped to guide the way. Freud, a Jewish German, fled Nazism in the 1930s and settled in England. He was on the hit-list of people to kill when the Germans invaded Britain. Fortunately for Freud, the Germans never invaded. And even if they had, it wouldn’t have done them any good. He died less than a month after the war started.

Phrenology

Perhaps you might have seen one of these?

These days, people buy them as paperweights, bookends, curiosities, dust-collectors, souveniers, decorations and hat-holders. But back in the Victorian era, these things were used to understand the brain.

Or something like that.

Shakespeare once wisely said that there was “no art to finding the mind’s construction in the face” (taken from ‘Macbeth‘, that was, in case you’re wondering). What the Bard meant was that it’s impossible to just look at someone, study their face, and then automatically know what’s going on inside their head.

Apparently, Victorian psychiatrists, doctors and psychologists…disagreed with the great playwright, because for most of the 19th century, phrenology held sway as the latest way to read and understand the workings of the human brain. And they were onto something!

…or not.

Phrenology has absolutely NO medical or scientific fact to back it up at all. It was dismissed as quackery by the end of the Victorian era and was declared to be of no practical benefit at all to the fields of medicine or science.

But what was phrenology?

The ‘Science’…so-called…of Phrenology, supposed that a person’s personality and traits, his mannerisms and so-forth, could be determined, or even predicted, by studying the shape of his head. If you’ve ever heard of ‘death-masks’ (masks or busts made of prisoner’s heads after their executions), they were made to try and study the heads (and minds) of the “criminal class”, as it was called in Victorian times. It was hoped that by studying the heads of criminals, their shapes, their foreheads, positions of ears and so-forth, a general list of ‘characteristics’ could be compiled, showing the public the typical face (and traits) of someone who is (or would become) a criminal.

Phrenology advocated the belief that the brain is divided into segments or “organs”. Each organ controlled an emotion, or trait, such as lust, hope, curiosity, aggressiveness, gentility, connivance and so-forth. It was believed that by examining the head of a person, you could map or determine his personality traits.

How?

Using a pair of phrenology calipers. They look like this:

You can stop sucking in your belly. They’re not for measuring body-fat.

The calipers were used to measure the head. By examining the size of the cranium (that’s fancy medical talk for your skull) the phrenologist could pick up on any abnormalities. He was looking for bumps or strange inconsistencies on your head. The positions of these bumps on your head were transferred to a chart (or to a phrenology head) where a number would be printed. The number corresponded with a trait, printed on an accompanying list. The bumps indicated the areas of the brain which were, supposedly, the most developed, and by extension, the personality traits that were most developed within your brain. This could determine your mood, temperment, likelihood for criminal behaviour, propensity towards violence, drunkenness, abusiveness, gaiety…all kinds of things! Fascinating!

Did it work?

No.

But it sure makes for interesting blog-material.

Phrenologists, as they were called, believed that each section of the brain controlled or housed a particular trait or emotion. You can see that here in this chart from 1895:

As you can see, phrenology didn’t last very long. This page is taken from a medical dictionary from 1895. Note the opening passage, that phrenology was the “…science of the special functions of the several parts of the brain, or of the supposed connection between the faculties of the mind and the organs of the brain…”.

Phrenology continued to linger long after it was dismissed as quackery by the respected medical community. It’s mentioned in “Dracula”, by Bram Stoker, and in numerous Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Most notably, in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, where Dr. James Mortimer confesses to an interest in phrenology…specifically, in a close examination of Holmes’s head! (“A cast of your skull, sir, until the original becomes available!”).

Want to know more about phrenology? Here’s an interesting and rather funny lecture given by Prof. John Strachan of Northumbria University in England. Enjoy!…Oh, this is just Part 1. If you want the rest, click on the video and it’ll take you to YouTube, where you can see the rest of it.

A New Century

The Great War of 1914 brought a new horror to the world of mental illness. It was given the title ‘Shell shock’, and was believed to be caused by the deterioration of the mental state, caused by the constant bombardment of artillery shells. The unrelenting stress thus created, it was believed, caused the affected person’s brain to just snap and blow a fuse.

It was in the first half of the 1900s that mental illnesses started getting names. Names like…

Catatonia (1874).

Schizophrenia (1908), from the Greek words that described a ‘split mind’.

Melancholia (An older term. ‘Depression’ today).

Bipolar Disorder (1957). Previously called ‘Manic Depression’ (1952) and ‘Circular Insanity’ (1854).

The 20th century also brought forth a new and terrifying treatment. One which had no sure and certain outcome and which could, if performed poorly (or performed at all!), leave the patient as a comatose vegetable. It was called the lobotomy.

Tinkering with what does the thinking, has been a fascination for centuries…just look at medieval trepanning. The lobotomy had its roots in late-Victorian scientific and medical experimentation. Great strides were being made in medicine during the turn of the 20th century. New drugs, new ways of doing things, new understanding, new technologies, were making the treatment of patients faster, safer, cleaner and more effective. Why not might the same be done for the human brain?

Mostly because the results were almost always a failure.

The Lobotomy

Ah, the lobotomy. Famous in horror films for turning monsters into angels, angels into monsters, and right-thinking people into perfect vegetables. But what is it?

The lobotomy as is most commonly thought of, was developed in the mid-1930s by Antonio Egas Moniz. In 1935 and 1936, Moniz ‘perfected’ one of the most controversial medical treatments in the history of medical treatments…and that’s saying a lot.

A lobotomy involves making two incisions (holes) in the front of the head and inserting a pair of blades into the brain, whereafter two cuts or slices are made into the frontal lobes (quarters) of the brain. This was supposed to alter the workings of the brain, calm the patient down and affect a remarkable change in personality.

…or not.

Some lobotomies were pulled off with relative success. Others became tragic failures. Because the lobotomy required small, precise slices or cuts into the brain, a small, precise instrument was used. Originally, that instrument was one of these:

The scientific term is an ‘orbitoclast’, but its similarity to the axes and picks used by mountain-climbers…

…caused people to call operations carried out with these instruments, ‘ice-pick lobotomies’.

Unsurprisingly, lobotomies were incredibly risky. Patients risked everything from death, paralysis, becoming a vegetable, losing their faculties, their ability to speak, see, function properly in society…It makes you wonder why such a treatment was ever devised in the first place! One of the most famous people to receive a lobotomy was a 12-year-old boy named Howard Dully. He’s still alive today. He was born in 1948. The lobotomy was performed on him with the permission of his parents. The damage was so severe that it took him his whole life for his brain to recover and for him to be able to function properly in society again. The lobotomy is such a mythical procedure in medicine today that he wrote a book about what it was like to have one, and the effects that it had on his life. His memoir is titled “My Lobotomy”.

The effects (and benefits, if any) of lobotomies were disputed almost immediately. Even by the 1940s, people were questioning whether or not this ‘procedure’ did anything useful at all. The Soviet Union made the performing of lobotomies illegal as early as 1950. By the 1970s, most other countries had followed suit. During the heyday of the lobotomy (the 1940s and 50s), up to 18,000 people were lobotomised in the United States alone.

Electroshock Treatment

Electroshock treatment or therapy dates back to 1938. It was devised by Italian psychiatrists Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini. Cerletti first experimented on animals, as all good scientists did back in those days, before moving onto human patients.

Why on earth would zapping someone with electricity be considered a good thing?

Cerletti believed so because he noted a remarkable change in his aggressive, mentally ill patients. Once zapped, aggressive patients tended to be calmer and more manageable. This was seen as a good thing (who wouldn’t agree?) and electroshock therapy was slowly introduced around the world, to treat those who had mental illnesses that caused them to be a danger to those around them, such as the “criminally insane”.

Electroshock therapy is obviously dangerous. Improper use of the therapy can lead to brain-damage, most notably, temporary or permanent memory-loss. It was often prescribed for violent criminals to calm them down, or for mentally ill patients who posed a physical danger to those around them. It’s still used today, to treat extreme depression, although in the 21st century, it’s much safer. It can still result in varying levels of memory-loss however…so if your doctor decides to prescribe you this treatment…think twice before saying ‘Yes’.

Looking for more Information?

Index of British Lunatic Asylums

The History of Phrenology

Documentary Film: “Bedlam: The History of Bethlehem Hospital“.

History of the Bethlehem Royal Hospital

“What is a Lobotomy?”

“What is a Lobotomy?” (WiseGeek.com)