Christmas and stockings an age old tradition

Christmas and stockings are two words forever bound together. They illustrate the magic and generosity of Christmas time. The tradition is an old one whose origins are lost in the mists of time but William Lee of Calverton, Nottinghamshire is the man who made it possible for us to hang up our modern stockings.

In 1589 he made the first breakthrough in stocking manufacture. It is said that he invented the stocking frame, a machine that knits stockings and socks for love.

One story has it that he invented it out of spite: having discovered his sweetheart preferred her knitting to his attentions, another suggests he invented it for his hard working wife who knitted stocking by hand to supplement their family income.

Stocking Frame at Ruddington
Framework Knitters' Museum

During the 18th century stocking frames quickly became the domain of men like weaving machines while the hand knitters remained primarily women. The English East Midlands, particularly in the towns of Nottingham and Leicester became the centre of stocking manufacture from the 18th century.

Tough, hand knitted
woollen blue stockings

Until the invention of nylon there were two types of stocking; the luxury ones and the utilitarian ones. Luxury stockings were made from imported silk, or the fine fibres of long-wooled sheep, on a machine by a male frame knitter in London or one of the East Midland towns. Utilitarian socks were hand-knitted, usually by poor women in the country and was made from the much coarser wool of the sheep of Westmorland, Wales, or Scotland.

Elegant, machine knitted French silk stockings

The frame-knitted silk stockings were costly
accessories worn by men and women of middling and upper rank. Without elastic they where held up by garters and ribbons. Thousands of pairs were exported and sold in the British colonies, which were bound by the mother country’s restrictions on manufacturing.
In 1767, Benjamin Franklin’s enterprising maidservant, Ann Hardy, made a reasonable second income selling socks and worsted stockings to Philadelphians from the supplies her British friends sent to her.

A racy pair of candy cane
Christmas stockings

There are no records to say when Europeans started to hang an empty stocking or sock by the fire in the hope of receiving a Christmas gift. Legend tells us that it began with a poor man who had three very beautiful daughters but no money for their dowries.

Saint Nicholas it is said heard of the man’s plight and wanted to help but knew the old man would not accept charity so he decided to help in secret. After dark, he threw three bags of gold through an open window into the house and one landed in a stocking. So the tradition of receiving gifts in stockings from a strange man under the cover of darkness was born – blimey it sounds positively saucy when put like that!

However, there is another possible origin for the practice. According to writer Phyllis Siefker, Scandinavian and German children would place their boots, filled with carrots, straw, or sugar, near the chimney for Odin's flying horse. Odin would then reward them with gifts or sweets (candy). This practice, she claims, survived in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands after the adoption of Christianity and became associated with Saint Nicholas through Christianisation. Another possible source is the Grandmother cult in Bari, Italy where grandmothers would put gifts in stockings at Christmas. This too merged with the St. Nicholas tradition.

The modern Santa

Today the Christmas stocking tradition is going strong. In our family, we always hang our stockings up on Christmas Eve and wake on Christmas morning to find them filled with chocolate money, an orange, a walnut and a little toy. (I wonder which magical person does that?). Every family has its own Christmas traditions and special magical people who make them happen - is it you?




Sources: https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2014/05/05/a-brief-history-of-british-socks/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_stocking

Picture credits:
French Medium: silk, metallic Dimensions: Length: 23 in. (58.4 cm) Accession Number: C.I.55.52.1a, b The Metropolitan Mueseum of Art
http://anextraordinaryday.net/from-sweater-to-christmas-stocking-in-12-easy-steps/
https://www.smiffys.com/candy-stripe-thigh-high-stockings-red-and-white
http://www.southernsavers.com/stocking-stuffer-round-up-1219/
The Carol Burnett Show: The Family (Merry Christmas Mama) - 1974

The Unfortunate Captain Peirce: When is a Hero not a Hero?

The wreck of the 'Halsewell', Indiaman, 1786, Thomas Stothard

Two and twenty years ago the merchant marine got its first hero; Captain Richard Peirce of the ill-fated East Indiaman the Halsewell. The ship which left Gravesend docks on the first day of January 1786 with a manifest of 240 people and was wrecked six days later of the Dorset coast with the loss of over 170 lives. The tragedy rocked the nation to its core and the ship’s captain became a national hero with stories and eulogies[1] appearing the London press and magazines like The Gentleman and The European praising his self-sacrifice for the sake of his family. The ship was not the first to go down and it certainly was not the last but this wreck captured the nation’s imagination for some reason.

Built by Wells of Blackwall in 1778 the 758 ton ship was on route to Madras armed with 12 cannon and carrying a cargo of 53 chests of small arms, 25 tons of copper plate, 500 tons of lead for shot, and general merchandise including pitch, grindstones, tar, chains and bellows but the main consignment was the men of the 2^nd Battalion and the 42^nd Regiment of the East India Company’s army who were being sent to replace men lost in Company’s war with the last mogul emperor with any clout, Hydra Ali, three years earlier.

 In addition to these soldiers the Haleswell has civilian passengers, including the two daughters Eliza and Mary-Ann; and two nieces of the captain Amy and Mary Paul, a Miss Elizabeth Blackburn,a  Miss Mary Haggard, a Miss Ann Mansell and a Mr John Shultz. The first mate, Thomas Burston, was a member of the Peirce family and was also lost in the incident. None of the women were able to escape and were among about 170 who died in the ship, which disintegrated within two hours of striking the rocky promontory. 

The Loss of the Haleswell, J.M.W Turner.

Accounts[2] given by two surviving officers Meriton and Rogers said that Peirce heroically remained with them and is shown on the right of the painting above, seated between and comforting his daughters. Meriton and Rogers stand on the left, on the point of departure, as calm observers of the group.

During the eighteenth century a number of men achieved the status of national hero, the most famous of them being the legendary Captain James Cook (1728-1779), the man who spent his life exploring and mapping; Newfoundland, Australia, the Hawaiian Islands and New Zealand for the British Crown.

During the Seven Years' War, Cook served in North America as master of Pembroke (1757) In 1758 he took part in the major amphibious assault that captured the Fortress of Louisbourg from the French, after which he participated in the siege of Quebec City and then the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. He showed a talent for surveying and cartography, and was responsible for mapping much of the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River during the siege, thus allowing General Wolfe to make his famous stealth attack on the Plains of Abraham.

In 1766, Admiralty engaged Cook to command a scientific voyage to the Pacific Ocean. The purpose of the voyage was to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun for the benefit of Royal Society inquiry into a means of determining longitude. Once the observations were completed, Cook opened his sealed orders and started the second part of his voyage: to search the south Pacific for signs of the postulated rich southern continent of Terra Australis. He sailed around New Zealand and landed on Australian soil on 19 April 1770, and in doing so his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered its eastern coastline. 

Two years later as the commander of HMS Resolution with his companion ship HMS Adventure he circumnavigated the globe at an extreme southern latitude, becoming one of the first to cross the Antarctic Circle on 17 January 1773.

On his last great voyage Cook was charged with looking for a north-west passage around the American continent. He sailed via Cape Horne and into the Pacific Ocean stopping off at Hawaii and the Sandwich Islands. Cook sailed as far north as Vancouver Island than turned back and was killed in an altercation with the local Hawaiian chief on 14 February 1779.

The Death of Captain James Cook,  Johann Zoffany, circa 1795.

So, how was it that Captain Peirce of the East India Company could be compared with the heroic Cook? 

In the latter part of the eighteenth century as tariffs were lowered on tea, brandy and other luxury goods the amount of smuggling along the coast was at last beginning to fall. Wrecks too were becoming less attractive to looters. The rescuers of the survivors were hailed by the King and the Company provided a reward of 50 guineas for their efforts. The survivors who were mainly crew had to walk all the way back to London through snow and rain, there was no reward for them. In fact the crew were lambasted[3] in some sections of the London press for failing to do their duty and for disobeying their captain and it became a commonly held view that the reason for the disaster was the lax attitude of the crew and their failure to follow their captain’s orders.

Thompson[4] argues that placing Peirce in the company of a man like Cook elevated him to an example of the national character, the embodiment of British courage and virtue in war. But Pierce was not at war and neither was he a servant of the state like Cook and other heroes such as Wolfe and Andre he was engaged in trade and a lucrative one at that. On a successful voyage a captain like Pierce could expect to make £10,000, and extra-ordinary amount of money compared to his pay which would have been something in the order of £300 a year and he was hoping to marry his daughters and nieces to rich officers or merchants along the way. But for a nation hungry for commercial success and wealth Pierce was their man, a jewel in their social crown and an example of familial loyalty and enterprise in the area of the world they were most interested in, India. “In death, Peirce becomes implicitly iconic not only for British courage and manly virtue but also the East India Company’s paternalism and its mission to form stronger bonds of affection and sociability both within British society and between Britain and its colonial dominions.

However, the legal implications of the commonly held view that the crew was the chief cause of the disaster were to have lasting significance for seamen who found themselves under the control of brutal officers, as both commercial owners and the British Crown were able to cite the example of the Halsewell as a reason for the maintenance of strict order, by force if necessary by officers on the lower orders.

The story of the Haleswell (renamed the Sherwell) inspired the beginning of my up- coming novel, Sinclair which will be available later this year.

[]] Monody, On the death of Captain Peirce, 1786.

[2] A circumstantial narrative of the loss of the Halsewell, East-Indiaman .Henry Meriton (second mate of the Halsewell.), John Rogers (third mate of the alsewell.)http://www.responsites.co.uk/halsewell/

[3]The London Recorder, January 15^th, 1786.

[4] Ship Wreck in Art and Literature, Carl Thompson, Routledge, 2013