![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jjporWell, I have returned and, to be honest, despite my dire expectations the weather last week in the vicinity of Penrith and Keswick was much better than we could have hoped for; grey but dry last Saturday, Sunday, Monday, admittedly peeing down on Tuesday, but really rather bright and sunny for the rest of the week (although on Thursday I was trudging along an extremely exposed ridge on the Cumbria-Northumbria border following a mostly-surviving section of Hadrian's Wall, which while sunny proved to be blimmin' cold too).
Anyway, sights were seen, ale was quaffed and photos were taken, so I reckon I'm counting that one as a result. To get back on-topic, anyway:
Yes, last Wednesday we visited the (in?)famous Pencil Museum in Keswick, something I have been aware of for quite a few years yet never visited. It was really rather interesting, you know. If you've ever wondered about how they actually manufacture pencils, and the history of same, or even if you haven't, and you're willing to pay the admission fee to what is, at the end of the day, not a huge exhibition, then I'd definitely recommend it.
Probably the most interesting thing I learned from the museum was the story of how Borrowdale "wadd", "plumbago" or "black lead", the naturally occurring crystalline graphite that was used to produce the first honest-to-gawd pencil-type-pencils, was discovered and exploited. The story goes that some time shortly after 1500 local shepherds came across a tree that had been uprooted by a storm and discovered pieces of a strange, smooth, black mineral in the hole created by the collapse. This was the "wadd", apparently produced via the same sort of process that creates coal (ie fossilised compressed vegetation from ancient swamps), but under greater heat and pressure due to volcanic activity. The result was a great seam of igneous rock with lumps of more or less pure graphite scattered throughout it.
The wadd had a variety of uses. The shepherds who first discovered it used it for marking their sheep; it could also be used for blacking ironwork to prevent it from rusting, and perhaps the main use for it in Elizabethan times, probably due to its combination of smoothness and strength and the fact that it could be easily carved into a variety of shapes, was manufacturing the moulds in which cannon balls were cast. On top of all of that was its use as a drawing material; pieces of Borrowdale graphite soon made their way to the continent via Flemish merchants, where Italian artists were probably the first to set it in wooden holders, thus creating the first proper pencils. And amazingly (to me, anyway!), before the modern industrial process for producing pencil leads was invented in 1795, the subsequently-developed mine at Borrowdale was the only source in the world for this material.
This scarcity meant that the graphite itself was of immense value. Iirc, the museum exhibit suggests that in modern currency the value would be something like £1,500 per kilo; practically the entire output of the mine, once it had been dug out of deep tunnels and galleries under hellish working conditions, was shipped under armed guard to the Tower of London, then the country's main arsenal and armoury, where it was used in the aforementioned production of cannon shot. However, this did not prevent some of the precious material from finding its way into other hands. Apparently, Keswick and some of the other far-flung Lakeland towns became the centre of graphite-smuggling (!) rings, secretly transporting the wadd to ships waiting in isolated coastal inlets from which it was shipped to the continent to keep those old masters in pencils, amongst other uses.
Things reached a head in 1751, when an act of parliament made the unauthorised trafficking of graphite an offence punishable by transportation to the colonies and soldiers were stationed to guard the Borrowdale mine. This, however, did not deter the smugglers and violent skirmishes were fought across the fells between the redcoats and the criminals who hoped to profit from the black gold...
And then, in 1795, French chemists invented a process for mixing impure, "amorphous" graphite, available from a variety of sources around the world, with clay to make the sort of pencil lead and industrial graphite we know today. The value of Borrowdale wadd plummetted and production at the mine declined and eventually ceased altogether. But still, a good plot hook for a historical novel, wouldn't you say? Pencil smugglers of the Lake District! ;)
This was far from the only fascinating thing I learned in the pencil museum. There was, for example, the factual snippet that the preferred wood for making pencils during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the cedar sleepers from American railroads, or the hollowed-out pencil containing a tiny, tiny compass and very, very tightly-rolled map of Germany, for use by wartime secret agents and escaping prisoners-of-war. But those might well end up being stories for another post or two.
I will just leave you with a book rec. I am currently reading State of Emergency by Dominic Sandbrook, a social and political history of Britain between 1970 and 1974. The author is perhaps a bit softer than I would like on the Conservative Party in general and on then-Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher in particular (but then again, looking at the newspapers he writes for as a day job, this might not be wholly surprising), but not to the point where I'd say it was a one-sided view of the period. The stuff about contemporary popular culture is pure gold, and very interesting for the Doctor Who fan. The chapter about the rise in popularity of environmentalism during the period is even entitled "The Green Death", and features a detailed analysis of said Who story and a couple of others in the context of the period. I haven't got to the chapter about what many people at the time called "women's lib" yet, but a quick flick forward reveals repeated mentions of Sarah Jane Smith in the first couple of pages. ;D Good stuff.
Anyway, sights were seen, ale was quaffed and photos were taken, so I reckon I'm counting that one as a result. To get back on-topic, anyway:
Yes, last Wednesday we visited the (in?)famous Pencil Museum in Keswick, something I have been aware of for quite a few years yet never visited. It was really rather interesting, you know. If you've ever wondered about how they actually manufacture pencils, and the history of same, or even if you haven't, and you're willing to pay the admission fee to what is, at the end of the day, not a huge exhibition, then I'd definitely recommend it.
Probably the most interesting thing I learned from the museum was the story of how Borrowdale "wadd", "plumbago" or "black lead", the naturally occurring crystalline graphite that was used to produce the first honest-to-gawd pencil-type-pencils, was discovered and exploited. The story goes that some time shortly after 1500 local shepherds came across a tree that had been uprooted by a storm and discovered pieces of a strange, smooth, black mineral in the hole created by the collapse. This was the "wadd", apparently produced via the same sort of process that creates coal (ie fossilised compressed vegetation from ancient swamps), but under greater heat and pressure due to volcanic activity. The result was a great seam of igneous rock with lumps of more or less pure graphite scattered throughout it.
The wadd had a variety of uses. The shepherds who first discovered it used it for marking their sheep; it could also be used for blacking ironwork to prevent it from rusting, and perhaps the main use for it in Elizabethan times, probably due to its combination of smoothness and strength and the fact that it could be easily carved into a variety of shapes, was manufacturing the moulds in which cannon balls were cast. On top of all of that was its use as a drawing material; pieces of Borrowdale graphite soon made their way to the continent via Flemish merchants, where Italian artists were probably the first to set it in wooden holders, thus creating the first proper pencils. And amazingly (to me, anyway!), before the modern industrial process for producing pencil leads was invented in 1795, the subsequently-developed mine at Borrowdale was the only source in the world for this material.
This scarcity meant that the graphite itself was of immense value. Iirc, the museum exhibit suggests that in modern currency the value would be something like £1,500 per kilo; practically the entire output of the mine, once it had been dug out of deep tunnels and galleries under hellish working conditions, was shipped under armed guard to the Tower of London, then the country's main arsenal and armoury, where it was used in the aforementioned production of cannon shot. However, this did not prevent some of the precious material from finding its way into other hands. Apparently, Keswick and some of the other far-flung Lakeland towns became the centre of graphite-smuggling (!) rings, secretly transporting the wadd to ships waiting in isolated coastal inlets from which it was shipped to the continent to keep those old masters in pencils, amongst other uses.
Things reached a head in 1751, when an act of parliament made the unauthorised trafficking of graphite an offence punishable by transportation to the colonies and soldiers were stationed to guard the Borrowdale mine. This, however, did not deter the smugglers and violent skirmishes were fought across the fells between the redcoats and the criminals who hoped to profit from the black gold...
And then, in 1795, French chemists invented a process for mixing impure, "amorphous" graphite, available from a variety of sources around the world, with clay to make the sort of pencil lead and industrial graphite we know today. The value of Borrowdale wadd plummetted and production at the mine declined and eventually ceased altogether. But still, a good plot hook for a historical novel, wouldn't you say? Pencil smugglers of the Lake District! ;)
This was far from the only fascinating thing I learned in the pencil museum. There was, for example, the factual snippet that the preferred wood for making pencils during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the cedar sleepers from American railroads, or the hollowed-out pencil containing a tiny, tiny compass and very, very tightly-rolled map of Germany, for use by wartime secret agents and escaping prisoners-of-war. But those might well end up being stories for another post or two.
I will just leave you with a book rec. I am currently reading State of Emergency by Dominic Sandbrook, a social and political history of Britain between 1970 and 1974. The author is perhaps a bit softer than I would like on the Conservative Party in general and on then-Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher in particular (but then again, looking at the newspapers he writes for as a day job, this might not be wholly surprising), but not to the point where I'd say it was a one-sided view of the period. The stuff about contemporary popular culture is pure gold, and very interesting for the Doctor Who fan. The chapter about the rise in popularity of environmentalism during the period is even entitled "The Green Death", and features a detailed analysis of said Who story and a couple of others in the context of the period. I haven't got to the chapter about what many people at the time called "women's lib" yet, but a quick flick forward reveals repeated mentions of Sarah Jane Smith in the first couple of pages. ;D Good stuff.
