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 During the 1920s Russia's Communist authorities, who had nationalized the
Singer factory, tried to counter British influence in Tibet by sending in
secret agents disguised as merchants to establish ties with the government
of the Dalai Lama. One group, led by S. Borisov, a former People's Foreign
Affairs Commisariat representative to Mongolia, carried with them a number
of Singer sewing machines, now manufactured by the Soviets, as examples of Russian goods. On the road to
Tibet, the team ran into trouble and were rescued by an Upper Mongolian
prince, who was presented with a Singer for his help.
(Recounted in "Vremya Shambaly" by A. I. Andreyev, St. Petersburg 2004)
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The sewing machine, even today, is revered by countless people, who remember their mothers and grandmothers sitting patiently at their Singer machines, night after night, making the clothes and earning the money that kept the family together. Writing this story, I've met one individual after another who tells me his or her personal version of the same universal story, like Gloria, a Chilean woman now living in California, who cried when she told me hers. Her father was a lawyer, bright and making his way in the world, when he died suddenly at 41, leaving her mother destitute, with four children to raise. He didn't have life insurance, said Gloria - who thought of such things in the prime of their life? Her mother looked around, saw her sturdy treadle sewing machine in the corner, and set to work. By taking in sewing, first for neighbours, then as a business, she managed to raise her children, to keep food on the table, and to keep the family together.
Gloria's fondest memories as a child are of playing at her mother's feet, the machine gently whirring as her mother sewed. "Did she teach you to sew?" I asked her. She laughed. "No, I was the flighty one; she only let my more serious older sister use the machine. She didn't trust me, but she liked to hear me playing as she sewed." Gloria's mother is now elderly and almost blind, and has no use for the machine. Gloria is planning to bring both her mother, and the sewing machine, to California. She will never use the machine, but it represents, like no other object, her childhood, the love of her mother, and the sacrifices she made to support her family.
Like Gloria, so many people I've talked to since I began my research seem to have a Singer story that I've begun to suspect people the world over are connected to Singer not by six degrees of separation but by one degree or, at most, two. A surprising number of strangers, in store lineups, in libraries, at community barbecues, have told me captivating stories about relatives who worked for Singer in different parts of the world, while others remember an old Singer ditty or rhyme.
My next-door neighbour "behind the tweed curtain" of Oak Bay, Victoria, who was born in Scotland, introduced me to several Scottish immigrants who worked for the massive Singer plant in Clydebank, Scotland, as their fathers and grandfathers had before them.
When the 97-year old plant was closed, in 1979, it wiped out 25,000 jobs, causing widespread unemployment and immigration. Their stories will be featured in my book 'The Great Civilizer: The Singer Sewing Machine and the Modern World.
Retired Jamaican thorasic and cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Ken Richards, whose mother was a seamstress, became famous as a young researcher in the lung plantation field by solving a lung transplantation problem using dressmaking techniques he had learned from his mother. Dr. Richards was an asthmatic child, and so he spent a great deal of time indoors, painting, drawing, and turning the handle on his mother's Singer for her while she sewed. A curious child, he quickly learned to sew by watching her, and astonished the family one day, at age six or seven, by taking apart a black and white gingham skirt his sister hated and making a shirt for himself with the material. Soon he was a competent tailor, and continued sewing occasionally all his life - he owns a little black featherweight Singer, which he still takes everywhere with him.
When Ken Richards became a medical doctor, surgery seemed the obvious option for someone so skilled with his hands. Early in his career, when the organ transplant field was still in its infancy, he was asked to join a plantation team. The team was succeeding at kidney transplants, but lung transplants eluded them. The problem was that, for the surgery to be successful, the newly transplanted organ had immediately to take over the full work of oxygenating the body. Invariably, however, the dog on whom the experimental surgery was being performed went into pulmonary hypertension, developed pulmonary edema and died within seconds of having his old lung tied off.
The dog's reflexes were thought to be the problem, and Dr. Richards was charged with using the current techniques of the day, including chemicals, to try to ease them. Watching the surgery, however, he realized immediately that the problem was not chemical but structural - where the artery of the recipient lung was sewed onto the artery of the donor lung, the blood vessel couldn't expand because the suture material being used was not flexible, causing constriction. Dr. Richards immediately thought of a similar problem in dressmaking, when a sleeve, attached to the smaller arm opening, has to be crafted to allow for arm movement and stretching. The dressmaking solution is to sew in an extra piece of cloth, called a gosset. Looking at the arteries, Richards understood that, for the blood vessel to expand, they would have to sew in a gosset or, in dressmaking parlance, to let-in a piece. Richards slit the blood vessel longitudinally, let in a piece of pericardium to form a gosset, and the dog survived.
Richards' team was so impressed that they decided to submit their findings to the prestigious journal Science. The only remaining problem was to develop scientific-sounding language to describe the technique, so that surgeons would not scoff at such a simple dressmaking solution. The article was well-received, and Richards went on to become one of the top eight surgeons in the lung plantation field in the world.
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 Estonian tailor, circa 1920- who is this man?
 Mexican Tailors - what are their stories?
If you have a Singer story, I'd like to hear from you. Any stories I use in The Singer Story will be gratefully acknowledged in my book.
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