Welcome to the October 2024 issue of our occasional newsletter, a momentous 70th issue. It is a little later than originally planned, though we must express a debt of gratitude to the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital for making everything A1 again.
AI or A1?
Just recently it has been impossible to get away from AI (artificial intelligence), because it is being used, abused and debated the world over. Reading about AI is disconcerting, because at a glance it looks like A1, and with some typefaces it is impossible to distinguish between the letter ‘I’ and the numeral ‘1’ (and to add to the confusion, I is the Roman numeral for one).
Classification of ships
In maritime history, A1 referred to the highest classification of seagoing vessels. Lloyd’s Register was founded as a classification society in 1760, and surveyors recorded the condition of vessels. The information was printed in annual Lloyd’s Registers of Shipping, whose abbreviations and symbols changed over the years. The earliest known Register covered 1764–6, when top-quality vessels were classed as AG – the hull being A and the equipment G (for ‘good’). AG later changed to ‘a1’, but the Register for 1775–6 used A1.
In order to keep their class, ships had to be well maintained. Although classification was not compulsory, it was highly desirable, as it facilitated insurance and was a reliable sign of quality, reassuring underwriters, merchants, passengers and crew. Disasters could still happen to A1 shipping, but the risk was reduced.
A1 advertising
Time and again A1 was used to promote ships. An advertisement in September 1800 in the Hull Packet newspaper stated that the John & Sarah, bound for St Petersburg, ‘stands A.I at Lloyd’s, Will sail with the Convoy expected the first week in October’. This was wartime, when the Royal Navy protected convoys of merchant ships. For decades such advertisements were commonplace, as in The Times newspaper for April 1830, when the Mary, A1, at London Docks was seeking extra cargo and passengers for a voyage to Australia (she safely reached her destination on 31st December with a general cargo and 29 passengers ready to start a new life).
Even billboards along the waterfront at New York used A1, including the ‘Good American Clipper Ship, Glory of the Seas, Captain Freeman … rated A1 at Lloyd’s, now loading at Pier 19 East River’.
Advertisements sometimes gave the term of years allotted to a ship’s A1 status, such as in The Times in May 1868, when the Agra (A1 13 years), Belvidera (A1 13 years) and Sunbeam (A1 12 years) were said to be leaving soon for Madras, India.
At a celebratory dinner in 1884, the Liverpool shipowner Sir Thomas Bland Royden spoke of the value of ships having a Lloyd’s Register class:
‘I venture to say that wherever a British ship goes, bearing the classification of Lloyd’s Register, in whatever part of the world, she is accepted as being fit to carry any cargo offered.’
A first-class expression
The adjective A1 became widely used in everyday language to mean first-class, excellent, outstanding or tip-top. The expression A1 at Lloyd’s meant the same, and in 1934 the Annals of Lloyd’s Register noted:
‘The character “A1 at Lloyd’s” has obtained popular currency wherever the English language is spoken, but among the millions who use the term, comparatively few have any clear idea either of its real significance or of its history. This history, tinged as it is with the glamour of romance which attaches to everything connected with the sea and seafaring people, would form a fitting subject for the inspired pen of a poet.’
In 1895 The Sketch magazine published a poem called ‘Day-Dreams’, a nostalgic view of childhood. One verse was:
And when I sailed my paper boats
Across a big tureen,
I knew not what “A 1” denotes––
“A 1” at Lloyd’s, I mean.
At Halifax, Nova Scotia, an early mention of A1 was published in 1836 by Thomas Chandler Haliburton. In his The Clockmaker; or The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville, Sam Slick talks about one politician: ‘He is a splendid man that––we class him No. 1, letter A.’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club by Charles Dickens (better known as The Pickwick Papers) appeared in monthly parts in 1836 and then in book form in 1837. When Samuel Pickwick and his servant Sam Weller are being shown the meagre lodgings in London’s Fleet Prison by the turnkey Tom Roker, Sam asks if the other inmates in the room are gentlemen. Roker confirms that they are:
‘One of ’em takes his twelve pints of ale a-day, and never leaves off smoking, even at his meals.’
‘He must be a first-rater,’ said Sam.
‘A,1,’ replied Mr. Roker.
The publisher of Dickens was Edward Chapman, who may have been a distant relation of Thomas Chapman, the chairman of Lloyd’s Register from 1835. Charles Dickens was a friend of Thomas Chapman and visited him at the Lloyd’s Register premises in White Lion Court, off Cornhill in London. The idea for the surname of Augustus Snodgrass, a member of the Pickwick Club and a poet, is thought that to have come from Dickens seeing in the boardroom an oil painting of Gabriel Snodgrass (1719–99), a renowned shipbuilder and surveyor to the East India Company.
A1 or A1 at Lloyd’s was used in all sorts of situations, as in 1875 when the Journal of Horticulture, Cottage Gardeners, and Country Gentlemen was discussing auriculas at the Royal Nurseries in Slough: ‘Colonel Champneys stood up grandly amongst the others … from a decorative point of view it is A1.’
In 1887 a children’s magazine adopted the title “A.1.” and contained illustrated short stories, puzzles, history, science and moral advice. These images are from the very first bound volume, the “A.1.” Annual, dating to 1887–8, rather tatty now. After three volumes it was not so A1 and ceased publication.
************
ALL AT SEA
Sea Stories
We continue to do maritime research into all sorts of fascinating topics for Lloyd’s Register Foundation, with a focus on safety at sea, and regularly produce articles, with illustrations, that are posted on the ‘Stories’ section of their website. In our last newsletter, we highlighted stories about guano, women and tobacco smoking. Since then we have done work on ballast and swimming.
For ‘Ballast: A Hidden History on How to Avoid Shipwreck’, we talk about how ballast was (and is) critical to the safety of ships, what sort of materials were used, including shingle, sand and stone, and how it was obtained worldwide. You can read the story here:
https://hec.lrfoundation.org.uk/whats-on/stories/ballast-a-hidden-history-on-how-to-avoid-shipwreck
A linked story is called ‘Crank and Stiff Ships: The Impact of Ballast on Maritime Disasters’, which is about accidents and shipwrecks caused by too little ballast, too much ballast or the shifting of insecure ballast. You can read the story here:
Our third and final story about ballast is called ‘Ballast: Contaminating, Confusing and Changing the Environment’. Obtaining ballast and disposing of it had a severe impact on the environment. In places like the River Tyne, enormous ballast hills developed. Archaeological deposits, plants, seeds and various creatures were also spread across the globe. You can read the story here:
This last ballast story contains an entertaining, animated video made by Lloyd’s Register Foundation, which you can also view here.
Another story was launched on ‘World Drowning Prevention Day’, 25th July, called ‘Swimming, Drowning and Amulets: Old Attitudes to Safety at Sea’. Death by drowning was feared by mariners, yet few could swim, and their attitudes to safety were once dictated by superstition and custom. For hundreds of years the most common safeguard against drowning was the possession of a lucky charm, such as a caul. You can read the story here:
************
BOOK SNIPPETS
London Library bookshop
In newsletter 63 we talked about the ending in 1997 of the Net Book Agreement, which led to the rise of online bookselling and the collapse of many bookshops. The online American retailer bookshop.org, which opened in Britain in 2020, allows customers to select an independent bookshop. They then receive a percentage of any sales. How it operates is more complex than that, and the Wikipedia page here gives a useful summary.
The London Library now has a bookshop on bookshop.org, showcasing books written by members, and we were thrilled to find the paperback of When There Were Birds nestling within ‘Science & Miscellaneous’. You can support the London Library bookshop here.
Pelham Bookshop
Many of you will have fond memories of particular bookshops past and present. I (Lesley) grew up and went to school at Havant, Hampshire (on the south coast between Chichester and Portsmouth, right by Hayling Island). Once a typical small Georgian town, it is today barely recognisable.
At birthdays and Christmas there were book tokens to be taken to the wonderful Pelham Bookshop (alas, no longer a bookshop). I can still recall the floor to ceiling shelves in every nook and cranny, but for years my destination was up the steep, narrow staircase leading to the children’s books. This bookshop was where Havant Grammar School purchased books to hand out to prize winners on Speech Days, and I still possess two or three.
I have only a vague memory of the woman who ran the bookshop, Miss Irene Babbidge, and until now never appreciated the town’s good fortune. A formidable woman in what was primarily a man’s world, her bookselling career began in London in 1931. She then opened commercial libraries (which turned into bookshops), starting in 1938 with the Ibis Library in Banstead, Surrey (sold in 1950 to Martyn Goff, a well-known figure in publishing circles).
In 1941, during World War Two, Irene Babbidge also opened the Pelham Library in Havant, and a decade later added the Bay Tree Bookshop in nearby Waterlooville. In 1965 she published a book called Beginning in Bookselling: A Handbook of Bookshop Practice, and the jacket copy said:
‘Miss Babbidge, of the Pelham Bookshop, Havant, is one of the best-known and most highly esteemed of British booksellers’.
She died in March 1983, and her obituary in The Bookseller described her achievements, in particular as the key witness in 1962 when the Net Book Agreement was first challenged.
Irene Babbidge knew the book business inside out, and a 2010 local history pamphlet related that Leigh Park library (which opened in 1957 on the edge of Havant) had its own fund and could support local bookshops, especially the Pelham Bookshop. At that stage, the library had no telephone, but she arrived one day with Nevil Shute’s latest book, On the Beach (first published in 1957): ‘What a shame there was no way she could contact us, as she had him in her shop signing the new book and staff could have gone to meet him’. Nevil Shute had emigrated to Australia in 1950, but must have signed books in 1958 when he returned to England for the Model Engineer Exhibition. By chance, I read On the Beach during the pandemic, finding it incredibly bleak and haunting.
After reading the obituary, Mrs Joan Webster of Waterlooville wrote to The Bookseller: ‘I am sure that I speak for all the “Pelham Gels” over the years when I say that we all realise what we owe to her … I wrote to her at Christmas, and said to her, the most unsentimental of persons, that “The Pelham days were among the happiest of my life.”’ My own childhood would certainly have been the poorer without the Pelham Bookshop.
************
THE LONDON FIRE OF 1748
If you look through any old newspapers, instances of destruction by fire are common. Late last year we were in the Cornhill and Lombard Street area of the City of London that was once filled with banks, coffee shops, small businesses and dwellings, as well as the General Post Office. Alleys and lanes included Pope’s Head Alley and Exchange (or Change) Alley, seen here.
Change Alley
At about one in the morning of 25th March 1748 a fire broke out in the powdering room of Mr Eldridge’s, a wig maker and barber in the centre of Exchange Alley, barely a quarter of a mile from where the Great Fire of London began in 1666. After that disaster, building regulations had been brought in. Even so, in 1748 the London Magazine reported that the flames spread rapidly: ‘It was observ’d that the Fire communicated itself chiefly by the Tops of the Houses, over the Party Walls.’
Brick party walls provided a fire break between properties, but all too often did not extend into the attic space. Unlike the 1666 fire, this one was brought under control rapidly, using about 50 fire engines. One soldier even stabbed a man who refused to carry water to the engines.
The damage was nevertheless immense. About 120 dwelling houses and businesses were damaged or destroyed, and Mr Eldridge, his wife, two daughters, an apprentice and a lodger lost their lives. Maps and reports were promptly published, along with details of the inhabitants and businesses, which provide a valuable record of everyday life in Georgian London.
Birchin Lane, between Cornhill and Lombard Street
The map below was originally a pullout in the London Magazine for March 1748, but at some stage it has been oddly coloured. The buildings in dark grey were damaged, while the yellow, orange and brown ones were largely destroyed, and the one in bright red is Mr Eldridge’s.
The businesses that were totally destroyed by fire included seven booksellers on Cornhill and Birchin Lane, as well as numerous small businesses, such as stationers, a stocking frame knitter, hatters, woollen drapers, milliners, a button maker, a watch maker, a laceman, cabinet makers, a pewterer, a sadler and even an optician.
At a City of London committee meeting just three days later, it was decided that non-freemen in the building business should be permitted to rebuild the houses destroyed in the fire. Since that time, much development has taken place. The biggest danger today is no longer fire, but developers changing London’s skyline into a discordant, ugly mess, with acres of glass. If you are wandering round London, though, many glimpses of the past can still be discovered.
************
CREATING FIRE
Early matches
Before the industrialisation of the later 18th century, conflagrations like London’s 1748 disaster were generally caused by accidents with coal and wood fires or the careless use of candles, lamps and tobacco pipes. Homes often kept a fire burning in the kitchen hearth, from which a flame might be taken with a spill or candle. If none was available, then for centuries the most common method of creating fire was by striking a firesteel with a flint next to some combustible material (‘tinder’), which would be ignited by the sparks that flew out. The same principle is used today in lighters for cigarettes and barbecues.
Away from home, a flint, steel and tinder might be carried in a small tinderbox to keep it all dry. In the early 19th century attempts were made to replace the flint and steel with matches, a word that originally referred to the wick of a candle and also to lengths of cord or rope that were used like fuses. Short wooden sticks coated with chemicals were tried out as matches, but were expensive and dangerous.
In 1829 matches went on sale that were marketed as lucifers, and the term lucifer remained the generic name for matches right into the 20th century. They were known as ‘strike-anywheres’, because they were ignited by friction on any suitable rough surface. They also stank of sulphur and were unpredictable.
Once white phosphorus began to be used for matches, they were mass produced due to huge demand, After several years of exposure, the workers making them were afflicted by bone, gum and teeth disorders, including ‘phossy jaw’ in which the phosphorus destroyed the jaw bones. Because of their severe health problems, matchgirls from the Bryant & May factories in London went on strike in 1888, leading to a search for less dangerous chemicals.
Safety matches
In the late 19th century, safety matches were manufactured with potassium chlorate used on the match head, while an abrasive striking surface on the exterior of the matchbox contained other chemicals such as red phosphorus (safer than white phosphorus). These matches were advertised as safe because they could only be ignited when rubbed against the matchbox striking surface.
The underside of a Bryant & May matchbox of about 1911, giving instructions
on how to use their patent safety match box holder,
with warnings to close the box before striking the match
Boxes of matches became very cheap to buy, and from the late 19th century they had labels advertising all sorts of businesses and products such as pubs, hotels, shops, tourist attractions and even political propaganda. Matchboxes and books of matches were frequently given away as promotional free gifts and souvenirs.
In the decades following the Second World War, collecting the colourful and extremely varied matchbox labels became an inexpensive hobby worldwide, and societies developed for serious collectors. Nowadays, sales of matches have plummeted, and a fascinating source of social history is disappearing.
There is a great deal of information about all manner of things related to matches and their history on the website of the British Matchbox Label and Bookmatch Society (www.phillumeny.com).
Early and late 20th-century matchboxes. The Bryant & May label declares
that their patent special safety matches are not poisonous!
A selection of 20th-century matchboxes, including an inn at Chard in Somerset;
pre-World War One paraffin matches made in Flanders and advertising The Rock (Gibraltar);
The Regular Safety Match (1920s); the North Norfolk Railway;
an inn in Norwich; and Timothy Whites safety matches
************
NEXT NEWSLETTER
Thank you for reading this occasional newsletter. The next newsletter may be later this year or maybe after the New Year. Until then, keep reading and keep reviewing!