I was skimming through some Dickens novels and found the phrase ‘picking oakum’ referred to in the context of workhouses and jails as a punishment of some sort. (I had also found this referred to in writings about Oscar Wilde’s incarceration). My dictionary states ‘oakum’ being a kind of jute or hemp, and no other information.
What part of jute or hemp is ‘oakum’: stem, leaves, fibers?
How does one ‘pick oakum’, and what was the picked oakum used for?
Was it likely grown at the poorhouses and jails, or brought in?
Why was it a punishment (painful? tedious?)? Or was it more like prisoners making license plates (useful to the national economy?)?
When did the British jail system start and stop using this as a punishment (I am assuming it’s not a common task now)? And was this limited to Britain, or did other countries do this? [I have not read this anywhere else but the above mentioned literature, so I have no ideas on jail punishments in other countries.]
As I said, I have only seen this in Dickens (Oliover Twist, IIRC); does anyone know of other authors who mention this?
Can’t answer the literary questions, but the oakum I know of is a rope-like material coated in oily stuff. One use is to fill chinks in foundation rock, etc., to keep out drafts.
They picked oakum in Richard Henry Dana’s “Two Years Before The Mast,” too, and used what they picked, mixed with pitch, to plug any cracks in the hull of the ship. I don’t know exactly what oakum is, though, so I’ll be interested to see the answers to your question, screech-owl.
“The museum’s curator related the following anecdote about oakum to me. Apparently, during long
ocean-going journeys, if a crew member did something that deserved punishment, he would be sent to the
brig to “pick oakum.” This involved the laborious task of taking worn out, tarry line (rope) and pulling the
fibers apart so that they could be used as oakum. The euphemism “pickin’ oakum” was therefore associated
with someone who was in trouble. i.e., Where’s JD? Ahhhh, he’s pickin’ oakum again. Oh, he should have
learned better by now.”
Oakum is a fiber, used mostly in waterproofing applications as a gap filler. It’s usually spun into something resembling a heavy twine or light rope.
I’ve seen it used in plumbing when joining hubbed cast iron pipe – the oakum fills the space between the inside of the hub and the outside of the joined pipe. Once the oakum is packed in, molten lead is poured over it to complete the seal. Nowadays, new cast iron pipe tends to be hubless, with a rubber-lined sleeve joining the pipes – it’s less labor-intensive (not to mention less toxic).
I’ve also heard of oakum being used to fill expansion joints in concrete, and in shipbuilding to fill gaps between planks in wooden hulls (that was probably its main use in Dickens’ time).
You picked apart old rope to give fibers, which you tamped into the (many many) seams in a boat hull and deck using a mallet and variously-shaped “tamping irons”, then poured molten pitch in to hold it in place. This process was called “Paying” the seam.
The phrase “The devil to pay and no pitch hot” refers to the outermost seam on the deck, called the Devil, which was wider than the others, and therefore more of a bugger to caulk.
Have a look at William Hogarth’s engravings “The Whore’s Progress” ( better yet, see a commentary on it, such as the Dover edition of Hogarth’s prints). In the next-to-last print she’s working in a prison, picking Oakum. To do this, you pounded on old rope with a mallet until it started to unravel, then pulled apart the fibers by hand. Oakum was used in a lot of applications – especially the plugging of leaks in ships referred to. I gather that this was low-level, no-training-required work that prisoners could do, so they wouldn’t be idle. I imagine it was pretty rough on the hands.
Consider it a form of labor intensive recycling. As pointed out in the book “What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew : From Fox Hunting to Whist-The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England” – Daniel Pool, the Victorian (and earlier) English wasted virtually nothing. Before the days of mass production, even things like rope that we think of as commonplace were pretty expensive, and you didn’t just toss stuff out.
From The Crimson Patch, copyright 1936 by Phoebe Atwood Taylor.
(Hilda has just been discovered with the Murdered Woman’s diamond in her possession and realizes the bumbling police lieutenant will haul her off to jail unless Asey uncovers the real murderer.)
The Asey Mayo stories are all set in Cape Cod, so we might assume that oakum picking was, at least in New England, an occupation of lady prisoners.
Oakum makes an excellent seal between the logs on a log cabin as well. My parents built a log cabin on an island in Quebec in 1951 and the logs are all chinked with oakum.
Today the cracks in concrete are filled with a product called backer rod. It is a closed cell foam “rope” that is pressed into the crack.
I knew that they used hemp for oakum but didn’t realize that they picked apart old rope. Interesting.
In the British penal system during the Victorian period, female prisoners were put to picking oakum as an equivalent to the male prisoners’ hard labour.
I read a book once concerning a British sailing ship that wrecked a few miles off of the coast of Norway (?). The survivors were tossed up on a tiny island of rock and to survive, they hauled in the rope rigging and some of the sails. Since it was near freezing, they all picked oakum and packed it under their clothing for insulation. They described picking the stuff with numb fingers and how it made their fingers bleed. They survived out there nearly a week until a ship rescued them, by using oakum to lie on, oakum under their clothing and oakum wrapped around their hands.
The ship had carried cheese, and bits of it was salvaged off of the rock and mixed with seaweed and a little oakum and eaten to keep them from starving. Fresh water came from the nearly continuous storm they had been caught in.