Kermes & Cudbear (and Scottish rain?)

Cudbear and Kermes -- these are not a comedy partnership or a firm of Dickensian lawyers, but associated nevertheless, as these were both once widely used red textile dyes.

Kermes is an very ancient dyestuff, probably known at least since the bronze age, using scale insects, producing a rich scarlet,  so costly only the richest could afford it, until it was replaced by cochineal from Spanish Mexico in the late 1500s.

Roman Catholic cardinals in red robes, illumination from the Tres Riches Heures de Duc de Berry, France 1500s

Kermes dye was  much coveted by the Romans, who called it 'grana' ,  hence "dyed in the grain", without realising that the berry-like granules were the bodies of the female kermes vermilio insect, found on the branches of  the Mediterranean oak (quercus coccifera).
"Kermes is of the bigness of a pea, and of a brownish red colour, covered when most perfect, with a purplish grey dust.  It contains a multitude of soft granules, which, when crushed, yield a scarlet juice.  It is found adhering to a kind of holm oak. "  So Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of 1755.

Traditionally it was harvested by women: in medieval France in the Languedoc there are accounts of the women going out with lanterns and baskets, as the best time to find the female kermes insects with their unhatched eggs was just before dawn.  At harvest time in May, the women would grow a fingernail extra long for scraping the granules from the branches.   The insects were needed in such large quantities that the scarlet dye cost ten times as much as other dyestuffs.

Coronation cloak of Roger II of Sicily, 1133-34

Equally ancient, but much less spectacular is cudbear, a plant dye. Cudbear comes from lichens, particularly  ochrolecia tartarea, known as crottle in Scotland, but orchil or archil in England.

Ochrolecia tartarea lichen, i.e. Scottish 'crottle', archil or orchil.

 Samples have been found in neolithic caves in France and it was used by the Egyptians to make rich red and purple dye colours  (recorded in the Stockholm Papyrus circa 3rd or 4th century AD).   

The lichen was dried, pounded and then soaked in a urine solution to ferment for two weeks, producing a range of shades.

Archil was used for the rich reds of the finest Florentine silks, rediscovered and refined in Italy in the middle ages.  By the eighteenth century British dyers were importing costly red and purple dyestuffs from abroad - madder from Dutch East India  merchants, and archil (Spanish weed) from the Canaries and Cape Verde.  The demand for better and cheaper dyes and more variety continued into the nineteenth century.  

Cudbear Street in the Hunslet area of Leeds is a reminder of the Wood & Bedford dye works which was there in the nineteenth century, but the patent for commercial Cudbear dyestuffs begins in Scotland with one George Gordon, a coppersmith from the Highlands.  Repairing copper vessels in London, he noticed the dye-maker using a similar method to that of his granny who used native lichens.

George Gordon's comments intrigued his chemist nephew Cuthbert Gordon, who started researching and produced a commercial method for using native lichens, instead of expensive imported dyestuffs.  He and his uncle took out a patent in 1758  and found investors to help them set up a factory in Leith.  He called his dye "cudbear", after his family name Cuthbert. 

The Cudbear patent,   1758  © Scottish School Archives

By 1773 the factory was failing, and Cuthbert was imprisoned for debt, but was released in 1774 to revive the factory in order to repay the investors.  His patent method produced strong red and violet shades suitable for dyeing cotton, as well as wool, with less need for the mordants to help the dye 'bite' firmly onto the fibres.   He advertised with samples  "dyed in a saucepan" so not at full strength, to show his Cudbear could replace costly imported indigo and cochineal.

Cuthbert Gordon's sample advertising from his Leith Walk premises 1774 (from Scottish School Archives)

Cuthbert's efforts attracted a canny Glasgow merchant to invest in 1776 and the factory was moved from Edinburgh to Dunchatton in Glasgow.

Did this fuel the ambition of the merchant's 10 year old son Charles?, for in 1796 he left his clerking job and set up his own factory producing ammonium chloride.

He went on to achieve fame as an industrial chemist and his invention of rubberised cloth made his family name a household word around the globe.  He was, of course, Charles Macintosh (1766-1843).

From the Mackintosh catalogue, 1893  By now the variant K had become standard spelling
 © Mackintosh.com

And skilled fingers, like the insect harvesters', are still part of the manufacturing process:

A special glue is applied by finger, to seal the sewn pieces together. © Mackintosh.com

The Street of the Peeverie Beds

"Hopscotch is the name English children give to this pleasant pastime.  Nothing to do with Scotland!  'To scotch' means to score, and the beds or boxes used in this game, as you know, are generally scotched or scored with chalk.
...
Peevers could be as old as Babylon - the great city! And certainly peever beds have been found scratched on the pavement of the Forum which was the centre of life in ancient Rome.
…
For me the first summer's day is when you can sit on a wall that's warm.  I love that season in my street, especially the sweltering Julys when the pavements get as hot as Nebuchadnezzar's furnace and blue beads of tar begin to bubble through the macadam.  That's ideal peevers weather.

Victorian street children, (BBC Primary history)

But a start is usually made by the lassies on the first sunny morning of spring.  They get right down on their knees then and draw fresh boxes. …all the numbers are figured in a vigorous style and the 'one' is always finished off with a carefree flourish of loops.  Passers-by often stop to watch:

'There on the pavement mystic forms are chalked,
Defaced, renewed, decayed but never balked,
There romping Miss the rounded slate may drop
And kick it out with persevering hop!'

The passerby who wrote that was Sir Alexander Boswell*, in a poem he made called 'The High Street of Edinburgh'. "

James  T. Ritchie, in Miscellany Five, ed. Edward Blishen


*Sir Alexander Boswell, poet and antiquary, was the son of  James Boswell, the diarist and friend of Dr Johnson.
James T.R. Ritchie was a teacher at Norton Park School in Glasgow.  A science teacher for 30 years, he  is best known for his poems and records of children's traditional street games and songs, and he collaborated in a seminal film, The Singing Street, in 1950.

A Cabinet of Collectors 4: Dr John Hunter - the 'Knife Man'.

" My Italian Collection being now ariv'd, came Moulins the great Chirurgion to see & admire the Tables of Veines and Arteries, which I purchasd, & causd to be drawne out of several humane bodys at Padua:
 I saw a private dissection at Moulin's."  so John Evelyn writes in his Diary for April 1649.

One of Evelyn's anatomical tables, from Padua, 1646 

© Hunterian Museum, London 

He purchased his four anatomical tables, the  dissected human veins and arteries preserved on panels of varnished oak, in 1646, after  watching three human dissections at the Padua anatomy school, and had them "transported into England, the first of that kind had ben ever seen in our Country, & for ought I know, in the World, though afterwards there were others".

The College of Physicians was very keen for Evelyn to donate these rarities to them, but he was only prepared to lend them for an annual Lecture, although by 1667 he felt able to present them to the Royal Society, "and are hanging up in their Repositary; with an Inscription;".    The remarkable panels were eventually given to the Royal College of Surgeons, where they are on display in the Hunterian Museum.

The museum is tucked away in Lincoln's Inn Fields,  based on the amazing collection of Dr John Hunter, the eighteenth century pioneering anatomist and surgeon.  3000 of his specimens, or preparations,  are now displayed in spectacular glass showcases* at the Royal College of Surgeons. Thousands more were lost during wartime bombing, but hundreds of  his original specimens, or  preparations, beautifully dried or preserved in formaldehyde, many in their original glass jars, are still in constant use today for the detailed study of animal and human anatomy.

Visiting the Hunterian Museum, at the Royal College of Surgeons

The younger brother of Dr. William Hunter (founder of Glasgow's better known Hunterian Collection),  John worked as his brother's assistant dissectionist, and as an army surgeon, before setting up on his own, teaching and studying  anatomy, and researching new medical procedures.    He married well, and his surgical skills, together with his wife's fashionable salons for artists and intellectuals, brought him in touch with leading figures of society.

Dr John Hunter 1728-93,    Joshua Reynolds 1786

He introduced several new surgical procedures, from his practical experiences and his anatomical researches, including a cure for Coachman's Leg, a contemporary industrial strain injury.  His collections included a menagerie, and paintings by William Hodges and George Stubbs, and Sir Joseph Banks collected specimens for him.

This preparation, a gift from Edward Jenner to his former teacher,  shows the embryo of a cuckoo, with the shell forming.  Hunter wrote to him: "don't think, try the experiment".

Rare preparation of a pig's epididymis. 

By injecting the tightly coiled organ with mercury, Hunter was able to reveal its full length.    He was even asked to prepare anatomy specimens for teaching King George III's children.  The King appointed him Royal Physician in 1776.

Skeleton of Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant

Hunter was determined to obtain the Irish Giant's skeleton, against Byrne's wishes, reputedly paying around £500 for it.  It now is lasting evidence of Byrne's actual height of seven feet, seven inches.

The collection has continued to explore surgical history and the amazing nature of the body, carrying on from John Hunter's original work.  Today you can wonder at the left (analytical) half of Charles Babbage's brain or Winston Churchill's all-important dentures, along with the pioneering history of Lister's antiseptics and Harold Gillies' plastic surgery, with films of today's brain and keyhole surgery, all learning from John Hunter's collection and his mantra, "try the experiment!"

Images © Hunterian Museum, RCS
* John Ronan designs