Issue 65: my 170-mile detour to the pencil and pen museums
‘On a trip up north, I took the opportunity to geekily indulge two of my great loves – history and writing’.
Over my summer break, I fulfilled a years-long ambition to visit Gaping Gill. It’s a cave in the Yorkshire Dales, accessed via a 100m vertical shaft, that’s only open to the public for a week at a time twice a year. There’s no advance booking, so you have to get up early (5.30am for 6am set-off for me), walk 2.6miles up Ingleborough mountain (about 1hour-ish), and queue for a numbered wristband to be winched down from 9am (the waiting list tends to fill up by around 8.30-9.30am each day). A waterfall cascades down the access shaft and splashes powerfully on the pebbles below, creating a sensation of drizzle throughout much of the limestone cave. It’s an incredible experience and well worth the early rise and hours-long wait on the windy mountain.
As part of the trip north, I took the opportunity to geekily indulge two of my great loves – history and writing – with a 170-mile detour to visit the Pencil Museum in Keswick, Cumbria and the Pen Museum in Birmingham.
(Cumbria is also home to the Lake District, so there was that, too.)
Pencils have been manufactured in Cumbria for hundreds of years, first as a cottage industry, and then as a commercial enterprise from the late 18th Century. Their principal ingredient is graphite, which was discovered in the area in the 1500s. The story goes that a violent storm upended a tree and shepherds found the black substance entangled within its roots. While their attempts to burn it didn’t work, they did notice that it stained their hands. So they wrapped the graphite in leather and used it to mark ownership of their sheep – and the first, primitive pencil was born.
Pencil facts:
Graphite is a form of crystalline carbon and has the same chemical composition as diamond. Graphite is opaque and the softest form of this carbon; diamond is transparent and the hardest form.
By 1650, graphite was said to be more valuable than gold; it would have cost about £1,500 per kilo in today’s money. Its value led to a thriving ‘black market’ (and, allegedly, the invention of the term ‘black market’, for the tell-tale stains graphite left on smugglers’ hands) involving robber-resellers such as ‘The Dandy Wad Stealer’, aka Willy Woodman.
Today, around 14 billion pencils are made every year – enough to stretch around Earth 62 times. A standard pencil can write around 45,000 words or draw a line 35miles long.
The Pencil Museum in Keswick is home to some of the oldest surviving pencils, from the 1830s; one of the world’s largest colour pencils, a 7.91metre Derwent Studio ‘Deep Cadmium 6’; and the one-of-a-kind ‘PB Pencil’, made from the purest (thus, most silvery) graphite ever found to date.
This former journalist was particularly delighted to see the mid-19th Century ‘specialist shorthand pencil’, designed with an ‘unbreakable’ lead (NB: a pencil ‘lead’ is not made of lead at all, but various combinations of graphite and clay). The equivalent of the shorthand pencil today is the ’F’, the firmest grade.
Perhaps most fascinating was the story I learned about how Charles Fraser-Smith, a ‘fixer’ who supplied gadgets for MI6, MI9, and the Special Operations Executive (like Q from the Bond series), approached the Cumberland Pencil Company in 1942 to manufacture a special pencil for the Royal Air Force. After signing the Official Secrets Act, a select few of the company’s workers returned to the factory after hours and developed a technique for drilling out an 8mm pencil to hide a tightly rolled tissue paper map in the shaft and a 7.8mm compass in the ferrule (the metal band that attaches the eraser to the pencil). Four different versions of the pencils, featuring four different maps – of Germany, and escape routes to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland – were made during World War Two, but it wasn’t until decades later (after the details were declassified) that the museum learned of the secret commission. When they tried to recreate the pencils in 1999, using modern technology, they were unable to make them quite as fine as the originals.
My visit to the Pencil Museum lasted about 90minutes and was made more fun by the quiz (adult and kids’ versions available) I was given on arrival. On my exit through the gift shop I received two pencils as a prize for completing it.
Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK and was the centre of the Industrial Revolution from the mid-18th Century. It is sometimes called the ‘city of 1,000 trades’. It was here in 1780 that the first steel pen nib was created, and the first small workshops for machine-produced nibs set up just over 40 years later.
At its peak, Birmingham’s steel pen industry had 129 factories employing 8,000 women, men, and children, making one billion nibs per year. Women made up over 75% of the workforce.
The trade was considered a respectable role for women, but in truth, the factory owners favoured women because they were cheaper to employ, and better and more patient at the fiddly work. But by the late 19th Century, women began to organise to fight for fairer wages, the abolition of fines (handed out for infractions such as singing on the job!), better safety measures, and legal protection. Three trade unions were formed and successfully campaigned for rules to restrict fines and daily manufacturing quotas.
Pen facts:
Pen factory workers, operating hand- and/or foot-press machines, were expected to complete anywhere between 20,000-30,000 repetitions of their step of the nib production line every day (that’s an action at least every two seconds).
The introduction of the Penny Post in 1840 increased demand for pens, but the invention a century later of the ballpoint pen by Lazlo Biro signalled the decline of the industry.
A steel pen nib used for daily writing would last about one week.
The Pen Museum features three rooms: the first charts the history of the industry, and the charming story of how the museum was conceived by a group of enthusiasts in the late 1990s; the third features historical writing accoutrements, from ink and ink wells to blotters and pen wipes. Throughout both these rooms are examples of manufacturers’ impressive decorative displays and salesmen’s wallets that showcase their variety of nibs, including novelties such as a pointing finger nib, examples with smiley faces cut into them, and portraits (including the likes of Queen Victoria and William Shakespeare) impressed on them.
But the best part of the museum is room two: a recreation of a steel pen workshop where a volunteer demonstrates the manufacturing process, and visitors get to make their own steel pen nib. First you cut the steel blank (basic shape of the nib), then you pierce it to create a small reservoir for the ink, you mark it with the manufacturer and nib style name, then ‘raise’ it into a curved shape. Slitting the point is optional, as the demonstration doesn’t include the steel tempering process, which improves the nib’s strength and ‘machinability’, making the slitting process neater. Everyone is gifted a professionally manufactured (and tempered) nib at the end, too.
My visit to the Pen Museum lasted just under two hours, and I couldn’t resist buying a couple of the pointing finger ‘index’ nibs on my way out.
