The Pencil
In these digitised days, when we can read and write on our phones, many of us remain devoted to the humble pencil. From doodling for relaxation to marking up the text in one of my books before a reading, I often have a pencil in my hand. But I hadn’t given much thought to the pencil’s origins until a couple of years ago, on a research trip to my native Cumbria for my latest book.
We used to drive past the Cumberland Pencil Company in my dad’s Morris Minor to go walking in Borrowdale, oblivious to the connection between them. A connection I didn’t discover until I dropped by the Derwent Pencil Museum on the former factory site.
I use the term dropped by advisedly. In my novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, I dispatch the museum in a single sentence: a character’s desperate attempt to entertain a friend on a wet weekend in the Lake District. Visiting on an equally wet Wednesday, I thought I’d be in and out in ten minutes. Entering into a single room via a kitsch mock-up of a graphite mine, I reduced that estimate to five. A couple of hours later, only my craving for scones with traditional rum butter could lure me away from this fascinating feast for the mind.
It’s widely known that, when we refer to lead pencils, we mean graphite. But, when first discovered in the Borrowdale Valley around 1550, graphite was believed to be black lead. It wasn’t called graphite until around two centuries later, based on the Greek for ‘to write’.
A group of Lakeland shepherds came across graphite accidentally, after a storm uprooted a tree. They thought they’d discovered a new type of fuel and must have been disappointed when it didn’t ignite. However, noticing how the mineral stained their hands, they found another use for it, as identification marks for sheep.
Because the Cumbrian graphite was so pure and solid, it could easily be sawn into sticks. But the real innovation was crafting a casing to keep the hands clean. The first wood-encased pencil was made by an Italian couple in 1565 by inserting the graphite into a hollowed-out stick of juniper. Another technique soon replaced that method, involving placing the graphite between two carved-out halves which would then be glued together as a cedar-wood “sandwich”.
In the seventeenth century, graphite was also needed for the armaments industry, as a lining for the cannon and musket ball moulds. This left little for pencil manufacture. By 1650, graphite had become more valuable than gold. The laws of supply and demand gave birth to a trade in graphite smuggling.
Locals scavenged for scraps from the Borrowdale mines which were then transported across the fells by packhorse to the port of Whitehaven. If caught, the smugglers could be identified easily by the stains on their hands. The consequences were harsh, with culprits sentenced to flogging, hard labour or transportation. It would probably be little consolation for those involved that their efforts to support pencil production — or simply to feed their families — bequeathed us the term black market.
Author:
Anne Goodwin writes entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice. She is the author of three novels and short story collection published by small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize. Her new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, is inspired by her previous incarnation as a clinical psychologist in a long-stay psychiatric hospital.
She can be reached at
annegoodwin.weebly.com
