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| St Vincent treadles |
We like a tenuous link here at St Vincent Guest House!
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| Bangkok treadles |
If you have stayed with us and been lucky enough to have some good weather and have breakfast al fresco, you may have sat at one of our two “upcycled” singer sewing machine tables made from treadles we found at the side of the house. It was when we were on a recent holiday to Thailand that we saw a café in Bangkok had done the same thing with their old treadles.
Interested in all of the things we have found at St Vincent’s, and remembering the pain of learning how to sew as teenagers at school (for those of us unlucky enough to be born female and not allowed to undertake metalwork) we thought it would be interesting to look at the history of the sewing machine and found that there were closer links to the company and inventor and Devon than we thought.
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| Isaac Singer |
The BBC furnished us with an article in their “
50 things that made a modern economy” series. It appears that the creation and design of the new-fangled sewing machine, designed to improve the lot of pretty much every female in the world who had to undertake such a task (it took around fourteen hours to make a shirt) was made by a failed actor turned inventor called Isaac Singer. He had rented space in a workshop showroom, hoping to sell his machine for carving wooden type, but wooden type was falling out of fashion. The device was ingenious, but nobody wanted to buy one. The workshop owner invited the demoralised inventor to take a look at another product which was also struggling: the sewing machine. So, in the 1850s, in that Boston workshop, the inventor sized up the machine he had been asked to admire, and quipped: "You want to do away with the only thing that keeps women quiet."
Isaac singer was considered to be a bit of a rogue, a womaniser, who fathered at least 22 children. For years he managed to run three families, not all of whom were aware the others existed, and all while technically still married to someone else entirely. It appeared he was not a natural supporter of women's rights – and ironically, his biographer, Ruth Brandon, dryly remarks that he was "the kind of man who adds a certain backbone of solidity to the feminist movement".
Despite various copyright wrangles with several inventors suing each other for patent infringement and breaches, the so-called Sewing-Machine Wars of the 1850s were ended with the main players agreeing to work together, sharing ideas, and creating a near-perfect remedy to long hours taken to sew garments.
And now the link to Devon
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| Oldway House |
So, there was now a sellable sewing machine and they were being bought by the thousands. Back to our erstwhile hero Isaac Singer. Following three marriages, one of them bigamous, and many affairs producing many offspring, Singer fled the US following a bigamy court case and moved to London in 1862. In 1871, Singer bought the Fernham Estate in Paignton, Devon. The old buildings on the site were demolished and he commissioned a local architect, George Soudon Bridgman, to build a new mansion as his home. As part of the designs, Singer instructed Bridgman to build a theatre within the house. Singer lived there until his death in 1875 and his son Paris took it on, making several architectural changes to the building. Singer junior left England in 1917 and during the First World War, the building became the American Women's War Relief Hospital, becoming the Torbay Country Club in 1929, with many different subsequent incarnations. Sadly, the building is now struggling and there is a group called the
Friends of Oldway who are dedicated to restoring the building and heritage to its former glory.
Singer died in 1875, a millionaire dividing his $14 million fortune unequally among 20 of his children by his wives and various mistresses; one son, who supported his mother in her divorce case, received $500.
Despite all that, we like our tables.
