Wonder spawned in: 1870s
Wondered into being by: A plimsoll and the people
Wonderspan: 5 min.
I have no film for you this week but I do have this:
That's that, see you next week!
Ah, you want to know what it is?
Ok, so a little context for this week’s way of loving would be helpful. Let’s start with your shoes. Did you wear gym shoes for PE at school? The ones with the narrow strip of rubber around the edge and a canvas upper? If you’re posh you might have called them pumps (in Stratford-upon-Avon they’re definitely pumps even when your dad is a window cleaner) and if you’re Scottish you might know them as sannies, for 'sand shoes'. Or did you call them plimsoles? If you did, you’ll know what a sole is, and that makes sense because shoes have soles, but what’s a plim?
Come in out of the rain, gather round, make yourself comfortable and feel the warmth. Together we’re going to put this stubborn mystery to rest but not until the end. First, let's get back to that painted symbol.
If you already know where and what the symbol is then you get five points, you win (but no-one likes a smart arse, as I know from experience).
If you don't know what it is then have another look at it. You’ll see that there are some thickly painted planks of wood and at the bottom there is some metal showing. Now do you know what it is? Four points if you do.
Still stuck? The surface is vertical – the wood is higher up the surface than the metal, which is actually copper alloy. Three points?
No? Those planks form the side of something and are painted with waterproof tar-pitch. Two points if you know now where and what the symbol is now.
Deary me. Alright! It's on a boat! But what is it? Just shout out if you know and claim one point, otherwise please don’t feel too bad, zero is a cool number.
* * *
The symbol is a ship's load line, also called a Plimsoll Line. This particular one is on the pre-whoops-it's-on-fire
Cutty Sark but it’s now found on every ship in the world. The horizontal line should always be visible, otherwise the ship is deemed to be overloaded. The circle is there to make the mark easy to spot when looking at the hull. L R stands for Lloyds Register. The F and R are more obscure; F stands for Freshwater and W stands for Winter. These initials have to do with the variable buoyancy of ships according to the salinity and temperature of the water they're in.
[geeky fact begins] Sailing ships like the Cutty Sark are only required to have F and W but modern cargo vessels have a few more letters and extra horizontal lines to show the different levels of buoyancy allowed; they stand for things like tropical, North Atlantic, winter, summer, seawater, freshwater and so on. [geeky fact ends])
Before the Plimsoll Line was instituted in the late 19th century there was no regulation at all, in any country, setting the maximum load of a ship. In the 1850s and 1860s, ships that were clapped-out and overloaded were sinking far too easily.
The problem was that many owners were happy to let their ships go down. Rather than repairing or breaking up unseaworthy vessels, owners would keeping working them but insure them for more than their real value, so in some cases they could be worth just as much sunk as afloat. These were the so-called coffin ships, overloaded to the gunwales and sent off around the world. If the ship arrived then its owner made a much greater profit than had the ship been sensibly loaded. If the ship sank, then they cashed in the insurance. Either way, it was a win for the owner and it was quite normal for some of them to work a ship until it sank in this way. The lost crew were poor folk and, as everyone knows, in the eyes of some rich folk, poor folk are replaceable because no-one knows their names.
My dad – an old Merchant Navy sea dog who once took cargo ships through the Panama Canal – first pointed out to me the Plimsoll Line on the side of a ship and asked me what it was. I got nought points. He explained what it was for. Most of everything else I know about it, I know from Nicolette Jones, who wrote
a highly acclaimed book about the coffin ships and the campaign to stop them. She cites a report of the British Board of Trade in 1871, which said that in just one year, 856 ships sank within 10 miles of the coast in winds no stronger than a stiff breeze.
Seamen were afraid of crewing the coffin ships but it was illegal for a sailor to refuse to sail. Even so, many men preferred three months in prison than likely death by drowning. With sailors refusing to crew, it became so difficult to find replacements that, in one case, a coffin ship was crewed entirely by boys under 17 years of age; she went down and they all died.
These unscrupulous ship-owners were surely at fault, but they were also incentivised by the free market system to overload and over-insure their ships. If they did not, another company could easily undercut them and that could put their business at risk. It wasn’t easy for them to do the right thing even if they wanted to, although Nicolette Jones says many did resist the temptation to overload.
Parliament, whose natural state as we all know is one of inertia, was nonetheless becoming more aware of the coffin ships, mostly thanks to one of the first successful campaigns combining public agitation with democratic representation. Many ship-owners were also MPs, however, and while some were honourable, others did whatever they could to stop any progressive legislation. They argued that the state should not interfere with the right of business owners to govern their own affairs.
I wonder, wonder-lovers, whether any of this sounds familiar to you. The owners of coffin ships were hedging their bets on the ship arriving or sinking so that they would win both ways. Similarly, hedge funds of today bet both ways on the stock market, so they can be invested in the failure and success of a business at the same time; if the firm does well, the hedge fund wins; if the ship sinks, the fund still wins. The people who stood to profit from the coffin ships, as well as government and parliament of the time, were the ruling class, while the working class took all the risks. You can see the same demographic divide today, for example between in the government, which decides whether or not to go to war, and the soldiers who have to fight. The free market, combined with a lack of shipping law in the 19th century, incentivised competitive greed; it was difficult then, as now, for a business to put ethics first because the economic system would punish them for it. And people in power today, just as then, argue they have a sovereign right to govern their own affairs as they see fit; when the state intervenes it is seen as a ‘nanny’.
The corrupt ship-owners didn’t win, though. Samuel Plimsoll MP led the campaign over many years to make shipping safer for crews. He wrote a book to marshal the arguments and toured the country speaking to maritime communities, many of whose loved ones had been sent to the bottom of the ocean in the coffin ships. He agitated in parliament with passionate rhetoric; at one time he worked up such a righteous rage that he was escorted out of the chamber. (Oh, for an MP who would do that now!) It was Plimsoll who argued for a symbol on the side of every hull to mark a ship’s
maximum load, but ship-owners said that would be too complicated.
Nonetheless Plimsoll was a stubborn and cantankerous chap. Change was many years coming but he had the people on his side, and after he began to create political waves,
The Times joined his campaign. Largely thanks to Plimsoll's oratory and determination, rising public anger persuaded MPs that their seats could be at risk if they didn’t back the campaign. Eventually, the government amended the Merchant Shipping Act in order to require all ships to display Plimsoll's load line.
It is perhaps not surprising that Plimsoll was an amateur inventor. The symbol he designed is minimalistically simple. No fancier markings are needed to do the job, whereas any less would be insufficient. For all the modern gadgetry on modern shipping, the Plimsoll Line is still the universally agreed, standard means to know a ship’s maximum and current load
But, you wonder, what about the footwear? Well, we call gym shoes plimsoles because we think the name has something to do with feet, but it doesn't. The canvas-and-rubber shoes were originally called plimsolls, so named by a rubber merchant who invented them. Samuel Plimsoll’s indefatigable campaign had earned him such a public profile that he was known in every household as the sailor’s friend, so most people knew about the simple hull mark he devised to save thousands of lives at sea. When the shoe-maker made a pair of shoes which would get your feet wet if they were plunged into a puddle that was anything other than very shallow, he knew exactly what to call them.
Extra...
Nicolette Jones talking to the British Library about her book:
Reference:
Nicolette Jones: The Plimsoll Sensation
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