Forget-me-knot

As museum folks, we strongly believe in acts of remembrance. Preserving the past through photos, written and oral histories and treasured keepsakes are all important parts of what we do – and something we encourage individuals to do as well. But some acts of remembrance are a bit unusual, even for us.

Welcome to today’s artefact.

These beautiful earrings from our collection are a fine example of hair work jewellery. That’s right; they are woven from strands of human hair. Ladies in the Victorian era would use strands of human hair as their material and, following patterns offered through magazines such as Godey’s, they would intricately weave incredible, wearable works of art from human hair. These earrings were woven in a method known as “table worked” where the hair is worked on a special braiding table using a series of weights and bobbins to weave the hair into a particular pattern. Sometimes wax or wooden forms were used as well and the hair was braided over top to re-create the shape. Other hair work pieces, such as our sample below, were worked flat or “pallet worked” and encased under glass in brooches.

That’s the how – but what about the why?

Hair work jewellery was made for a number of reasons: sometimes it was created as a piece of mourning jewellery, using hair from the deceased to create a wearable memento to keep that person’s memory close. In other cases, hair work was created as love tokens or a commemorative piece to mark a special bond or union between friends or lovers.

Every age has utilized personal mementos as acts of memory (we bet somewhere in your house there is a scrap of your hair or your first tooth taped in a baby book).  But the extremely elaborate level of effort represented by hair work jewellery seems only possible in the unique circumstances of the Victorian era. 

Queen Victoria, in her sorrow over Prince Albert’s death, adopted a host of mourning rituals that became the standard of the age. Among these rites, she is known to have made hair work jewellery. She even gifted a piece of her handiwork to Empress Eugenie of France. Historians have recorded that the Empress was moved to tears by the gift; history has not recorded, however, whether the tears were of joy at Victoria’s kind gesture, or tears of embarrassment because Eugenie had forgotten to make a little something for Victoria in return.

All we can say for sure is that Eugenie likely always remembered Victoria’s forget-me-knots.

Irvin has the cooties

No matter how you look at it, it’s a bold marketing claim.

In 1915, the Irvin-Smith Company came out with a “Fascinating New European Game for all ages in life”. The concept was simple; a hand held game that involved tilting capsules into a small metal pen or trap. The game name, however, is anything but simple. Irvin Smith named their toy THE COOTIE GAME.

Now, if you’re like most people, when you think of cooties you probably don’t think ‘fun for the whole family’. Not so the good folks at Irvin-Smith. They boldly named their game after the vermin louse that most families would rather be without. But their intriguing approach to play went even farther than the daring name; the Cootie Game had as its background illustration a World War I battlefield.

When the toy was released in 1915, World War I was already a year old, and the background illustration captures in miniature what troops were experiencing in the Great War: men are poised in trenches; biplanes fly overhead;

cannon fire blasts across the plain; and soldiers with guns and bayonets make their careful way along the game’s bottom edge. It is a cartoon rendition of the horrors of war, cleaned up for a childhood entertainment.

It seems impossible that such a subject could be the backdrop for a children’s game, but the effects of WWI permeated every aspect of life and culture during the war years, even the toy box. Even more incredible is the use of cooties – one of the greatest scourges of the men in the trenches – as the challenge for game players.

The Cootie Game was a great seller with patents and distribution in the US, Canada, England, France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. But one has to wonder – what was the response of soldiers when they returned home from the Front and discovered a Catch the Cooties game in their household? We suspect not many would have agreed with the game’s claim of being “Good For Your Nerves”. After surviving the horrors – and the lice – of the trenches, it seems likely that soldiers would have had only one response to this game;

Irvin has the cooties.