Straight to the Point

On a recent family weekend in the English Lake District we found ourselves drawn to the Derwent Pencil Museum of, to give it the full name, The Rexel Cumberland Pencil Company. 

2B honest I wasn’t really sure what to expect. 

I didn’t have to make too much of a case to go there as it had been top of the list for some time but unfortunately the exhibition had been wiped out, or should it be rubbed out, by some devastating floods and had only re-opened in Easter 2017.

It was a bit of erase to get there on a very wet Sunday afternoon as we had make a very wide detour from our normal route home from the wonderful Lakes. 

We parked up and write away made for the purpose built Museum , a rather stationery almost portable looking building in the car park of the original factory, evidently long since abandoned for a brand new facility somewhere else in Cumbria. I suppose, the Management, when faced with an ageing manufacturing premises and yet with continued strong demand for the product had to draw a line somewhere

The company was established in 1832 and is a very well known Brand Name alongside the likes of Faber Castell, Staedtler, Caran d’Ache. 

We were lead by the presence of an old liveried delivery van to the entrance and paid over a reasonable entrance fee. 

In fact, I would have been more than happy just to stick around in the Museum Shop which had a full stock of the Derwent Range but the first exhibit is a mock up of a tunnel in a graphite mine which, not to make too fine a point, really catches your interest. 

Graphite, a crystallised form of carbon, was discovered near Keswick, England, in the mid-16th century. An 18th-century German chemist, A. G. Werner, named it, sensibly enough, from the Greek graphein, “to write.”The word “pencil” derives from the Latin penicillus, meaning—not so sensibly—“little tail.” 

Pencil marks are made when tiny graphite flecks, often just thousandths of an inch wide, stick to the fibres that make up paper.

The main exhibition hall is dominated by a Guinness Book of Records certified biggest pencil in the world and it actually works although understandably you have to take the paper to the yellow graphite rather than the other way around which would be physically challenging, if not impossible for a normal sized human being. This record has been surpassed a few times since and currently the world’s largest pencil is a Castell 9000, on display at the manufacturer’s plant near Kuala Lumpur. Made of Malaysian wood and polymer, it stands 65 feet high.

There are interesting wall boards with the story of the Cumberland Pencil Company from its humble beginnings through to the fascinating methods of production with the raw materials sourced from local and global suppliers. It certainly gives an insight and improved my otherwise sketchy perceptions of the process. 

One of the questions on a quiz sheet given on entry is answered with "The average pencil holds enough graphite to draw a line about 35 miles long or to write roughly 45,000 words". History does not record anyone testing this statistic.

A few short films illustrated what was behind special issue products and the role that pencils played in concealing wartime maps for the Allied Forces. 

The whole Museum is a riot of colours and shades, too many to describe but all 2B enjoyed. 

I doodled a lot amongst the display cabinets and hands-on exhibits making the most of the visit. Encouraged to try out the different pencils in the shop I found myself scribbling away quite happily with charcoal, pastel and conventional graphite and created this.

It is a great place and well worth the trip. 

Just to leave you with a few of my favourite pencil jokes and anecdotes. 

More than half of all pencils come from China. In 2004, factories there turned out 10 billion pencils, enough to circle the earth more than 40 times. 

Pencils can write in zero gravity and so were used on early American and Russian space missions—even though NASA engineers worried about the flammability of wood pencils in a pure-oxygen atmosphere, not to mention the menace of floating bits of graphite.

After the very hostile merger between the giants of US aircraft manufacturing , McDonnel and Douglas the two parts of the newly formed conglomerate  had their pencils printed both left-handed and right-handed. At the Douglas Aircraft facility in Long Beach, CA, the printing read 'McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company' from point end to eraser end, while at the McDonnell Aircraft factory in St. Louis, MO, the printing read 'McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company' from eraser end to point end. Each facility then sharpened off the name of the other facility! Petty for sure, but that summed up the relationship between the two until they themselves were bought out by Boeing some years later. 

.........and my long time favourite,

Did you hear the story about the mathematician who had constipation problems? 

He worked it out with a pencil.