Welcome aboard the pride of the Cunard line,
the magnificent "QE2",
for a cruise through history I think you'll find surprising.
They say over the years, the "QE2" has seen everything:
good-lookers, millionaires, fancy dressers, con men,
French engineers, war, treason,
Scottish dancing, and deliverance,
which, funnily enough, is what this show is about.
I suppose, to continue the nautical metaphor,
the general theme of this particular program
is the way, throughout history,
people keep on stirring things up...
"making waves."
What's it going to be today?
Curly.
The permanent wave is just one of the many ways
in which the modern woman of today gets to mix and match, image-wise.
I mean, all you need is a beauty salon and money,
and you, too, can be different every time you look in the mirror.
Thanks to mud packs and seaweed baths and hydrotherapy and collagen
and the rest of the $20 billion spent on cosmetics every year,
nobody has to look themselves anymore.
And to think, the whole mega-business was started in 1904
by a German called Nessler, whose sister hated curlers.
Nessler's secret lay in the goo he covered your hair with
under these cardboard rollers.
Then he plugged you into his electric machine--
well, a set of heaters that gradually dried out the goo.
12 minutes later,
you'd come out looking like a million dollars.
In a flash of advertising genius,
Nessler called these temporary curls a permanent wave,
all thanks to the mystery goo,
which would keep your hairdo in shape for long enough to matter,
a godsend for desperate women,
thanks to a godsend for desperate men.
The desperate men in question were California miners
who'd run out of pickings
and were desperate to find another grubstake.
Well, in the 1880s in Death Valley, they did,
and started hauling out wagonloads of it to the nearest railroad.
It was where Nessler's goo would come from,
a mineral ore they'd found
that you could extract a magic ingredient from called borax.
Actually, "extract" makes it sound harder than it really was
because all you did was crush, boil,
filter, boil, crystallize out, and grind,
and you got yourself a fine powder
you could use for hairdressing
and glassmaking, plastering, table linen, starch,
electric light fittings, pottery glaze,
enamel, mouthwash, eyewash, antiseptic,
and water softening.
You might say with a sense of irony
that borax was worth its weight in gold.
And speaking of gold,
these miners were only in California at all
because of something that happened earlier
in the place most people think of when they talk about wealth:
Switzerland.
I know the Swiss have a bit of a stuffy image--
cuckoo clocks, yodeling, you know--
but not all Swiss are that dull.
One of them dug up half of California,
which is why they found the borax in the first place,
thanks to one of the greater con men in the early West.
The chap in question also sounds like a real creep.
He starts life here as a grocery assistant in Switzerland.
Then he leaves his wife and five kids destitute
and sets out for pastures greener,
passing himself off variously as a member of the Pope's Swiss guard,
a classmate of the French emperor,
a Swiss Army captain,
and a French officer,
none of which, of course, he is.
Name of Johann Sutter.
His greatest scams really persuade some people
to give him a lot of land
so that he can set up a kind of commune,
which he names modestly New Switzerland,
here, outside Sacramento, California.
He then buys reject Russian Army uniforms
with which he dresses his people up
to run a trading post he names modestly Sutter's Fort.
Then in 1847, he starts a new moneymaking venture
50 miles up the American river from his fort.
The plan is to sell timber
to the settlers coming out West in dribs and drabs
cut and dressed at Sutter's new sawmill.
Well, that's the plan.
But this is where friend Sutter's life starts to go very slightly haywire.
On January the 28th, 1848, evening,
Sutter is passing the time fiddling the books or something typical.
Outside, it's chucking it down, blinding rainstorm,
when suddenly, in through the door rushes
the carpenter who's been building Sutter's sawmill for him
and who says, "Pant, pant, psst, holy schmoley.
" Bolt the door.
"Don't breathe a word.
Top-secret, look at this."
And he gives Sutter a rag containing a small rock.
They look it up in Sutter's encyclopedia.
I kid you not.
And when they do what it says they should do,
they know what the rock is and what to do next,
which is to put Sutter's sawmill here--
in what is now Coloma, California--
firmly on the map,
and then to change the course of history
for the state of California, the United States, the world,
and this program,
because they're about to kick off the 1848 California gold rush.
It's well-known that the people
who make the real fortunes out of the California gold rush
were the people who got there first.
It's less well-known that they got there first
thanks to something that had been brewing for some time
back in England...
because the English had spent the previous 200 years
becoming totally addicted to teatime.
And the real connoisseur of a good brew--
that is, any English person--
will for the very best tea leaves--
that is, the first crop of the season--
sell their grandmother.
So you got the stuff from China to London ahead of anybody else,
you could name your price,
so the Americans did...
charged double.
Why?
Well, they've always been go-getters, so they went and got.
Of course, the English didn't like that one little bit,
took the wind right out of their sails...
because the Americans pulled the trick with an amazing new ship
with more sails than anybody had ever seen
and a new, low, slimline hull,
a ship designed to take a cargo of tea
at incredible speed from China around the Horn
and up the Atlantic to London,
a ship known as the Yankee clipper...
in 1851, the fastest ship in the world.
Small wonder gold rush people in a hurry
took a clipper from New York to San Francisco
and got there first.
You know, history's full of irony
because the reason the American clippers were able to take tea
and then anything else to Britain--
and I mean, legally able--
was because the Brits changed their laws.
And they did so partly because of something else American,
something that starved over 2 million people to death.
It was an American fungus,
and in 1845, it arrived in Ireland and destroyed the potato crop,
leaving the Irish nothing to eat,
not almost nothing,
nothing.
There were too many corpses that winter to bury.
When the sheer scale of the human tragedy
and devastation finally dawned on the British,
they changed their very restrictive import laws
so as to let American ships bring in extra corn to feed the Irish.
But the gesture was too little and too late.
The American corn shipments convinced British industrialists
that all anti-import laws should be abolished,
and they used the latest means available
to get that free trade message out to rally all their supporters.
It was a simple enough message,
because free trade
would mean cheaper imports like American corn,
and that would mean cheaper bread,
and that would mean lower wages and jobs
and economic expansion and more money all around.
But the major political row created by the potato famine
that let the American clippers bring their corn to Britain
strengthened the hand of the free trade lobby in Parliament.
Although, they'd never have got the bill through the House
if it hadn't been for some crooked politicians
and some rather frank behavior...
thanks to which the free trade lobby
would be able to spread the word.
The frank behavior involved a number
of definitely strange brown paper parcels,
among other things, a dog,
a bed, and a housemaid,
all sent through the mail free.
This was a kind of weird shenanigans
a reformer called Rowland Hill exposed in 1836,
when he started looking into the murky workings
of the British post office.
It was all to do with fraudulent franking.
See, members of Parliament had free franking privileges,
and they were using them to mail this kind of stuff
to their pals all over the country,
losing the government millions in revenue.
Not to mention the time wasted by postmen collecting money
because you paid to receive a letter, not to send one.
And in any case, you couldn't read half of them
because you paid by the page,
so people wrote up, down, and sideways.
"What we need,"
said Hill to the people here in Parliament,
"is post boxes
"and a standard postage rate payable in advance
with a stamp on an envelope."
In 1839, Parliament agreed...
to this stamp,
the penny black,
and if you ever see one,
grab it because it's worth a fortune today.
And once again, thanks to America.
That's who did the penny black: a printer from Massachusetts.
His main aim in life had been just to make good money,
but I mean literally good money,
on account of all the bad money floating around.
So this American printer solved that problem
by making paper money designs so complex
it was too difficult to fake.
His name was Jacob Perkin,
and in 1804, he developed a printing technique that was so good,
by 1818, he was over here trying it on the Bank of England.
No luck.
Then he bumped into Rowland Hill, got the stamp deal,
and you know the rest.
Well, not quite.
Jacob Perkin had picked up his printing techniques
from an earlier idea by an Irishman
who developed copperplate printing
to churn out this stuff by the ton:
printed chintz,
by 1790, all the rage in America and Europe,
when all that matching covers and curtains business
started in a big way.
People put chintz on everything,
and the brighter, the better.
Speaking of which, notice how crisp the colors are?
This was the first time
they could put a whole mix of colors together,
even on top of each other,
that wouldn't run when you washed the material.
And all thanks to a new color paste that used a new thickening agent.
Well, thanks, really, to a worm-ridden heap of junk
known back then as the French navy.
See, mid-17th century, they were down to 22 ships,
and every one of them full of holes.
And then this guy called Colbert takes over,
decides to get a total grip on the country,
and turn it into an economic superpower.
Colbert commissions new fortresses all around France,
builds a new navy,
and offers tax breaks
to anybody who'll go looking for foreign trade,
one lot of which whizzes down Africa to Senegal
and starts sending back everything from slaves
to tobacco to sugar cane
and a lot of this:
gum from Senegal trees,
which the cotton printers would use as a thickener
in their color paste.
Remember?
But Colbert would have felt really fulfilled
if he could've seen all this garbage--
sorry, tourist income--
that one of his economic recovery ideas
helped to generate to improve transportation,
this: the Canal du Midi.
Colbert's Canal du Midi went from Bordeaux on the Atlantic
to Marseilles on the Mediterranean.
So you didn't have to sail around Spain anymore.
In 1681, it was the hottest thing in commercial transportation
the Western world had ever seen
and became the model for every canal that followed it.
One of the engineers who designed the canal
was a fellow called Vauban,
and he became a very big wheel: marshal of France.
Designed this bridge, as a matter of fact,
to carry the canal over a river.
Vauban's second greatest claim to fame
was building all those French border fortresses I mentioned.
His first claim to fame was inventing a new way of using trenches
to dig your way close enough to a fortress' walls to blow it up,
about which we Brits could've cared less
until certain rebels tried the technique on us
at the siege of Yorktown
during that unfortunate matter Americans insist on calling
The War of Independence,
which we, uh, lost
and all went home.
Well, not quite all.
There was one bunch of people-- 100,000 of them--
who stayed on until the Americans started hanging them.
I mean, of course, all the American loyalists,
the one in five of the population who'd supported the British
and who would now suffer for having backed the wrong side.
As far as the Americans were concerned,
they were all traitors.
And a certain Judge Lynch strung them up so fast,
he gave the English language a new word.
So by about 1789, most of the ones left
lit out for a new life in a new country
with another bunch of unfortunates
who had also lost everything here in Scotland.
This was the time of the clearances,
the fancy name for the eviction and starvation
and brutality and death happening in the Scottish highlands
as the people were forced out to make way for moneymaking sheep.
And once the absentee landlords, many of whom lived in London,
had got rid of their inconvenient tenants,
a new genteel Scotland was born with bagpipes and fake tartans
and Celt revival poetry and baronial halls,
a kind of 19th-century Disney version of the highlands.
This image of Scotland we all have today
was invented by the Victorians.
These ancient highland games only started in 1832,
and Scottish dancing is really half-French.
Even the short kilt was designed by an English industrialist
to stop the long ones
Scottish factory workers usually wore getting caught in the machine.
Meanwhile, the real highlanders were long gone
across the sea to join those American loyalists
in a new Scotland called Nova Scotia.
By the early 19th century, thousands of them were arriving
in any ship they could get passage on...
a fact not unnoticed by one particular ex-Loyalist
from Philadelphia.
His name was Abraham Kunders,
and he had "lost" a small merchant fleet he'd operated down there
till the time of independence and his hasty departure.
Good evening.
Mrs. Newby and Mr. Burke.
Nice to meet you, Captain.
Captain.
So he started again...
in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Did remarkably well.
By 1833, his son Samuel Kunders had a small fleet
and was running the first regular transatlantic passenger line
once he got the contract to carry the British Royal Mail,
which was going to be a real moneymaker
because of the penny post.
Remember?
So the company never looked back.
And if you're wondering why I got the name wrong,
I didn't.
At some point in the Kunders' life in America,
some official made a misprint and changed the family name to Cunard.
Well, that's it.
I hope this one hasn't left you all at sea.