Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the man of the hour, our super producer, Max Crochet Williams, Max.
The Pearler Williams. There we give the knit Master Williams.
Yeah, let's use all the words we learned for this, Max the knit.
The gauge, sock Darner, the froggy Williams. That's prood Frogging's cool, not to be confused with we just.
Said the gauge people. Okay, we'll be the gauge for this one.
That is Noel Brown. They called me, they called me Ben Bullen. And today, folks, we're embarking what is on what is probably going to be a two part episode. Uh, maybe we get into it this way. I mentioned crochet, which is related to knitting, because I don't know if I told you guys, my girlfriend recently got super duper into Crocheane.
You know, there might be some knitting enthusiasts out there. They'll be blasphemy.
Crocheting and knitting I have nothing to do with one another. Also, that might not be true.
They might completely agree with your assessment there, Ben, but I do know some folks that take these crafts incredible.
Seriously, so seriously, well they should. Yeah, Brandy makes well you know, she is an artist, so she doesn't just crochet doilies or stuff like that. She old not that there's anything wrong with that. She also makes crochet characters from games and from anime, from animal crossing and things of that nature. Now, I'm not gonna tell you folks to go buy her stuff, but we would love to hear your stories about knitting, because very interested in it.
Give it to us, give us the linkage.
Oh no, no, tell for another day. Oh come on, all right, I'll bug you about it later. My kiddo has been on a bit of a knitting slash crocheting journey doing something very similar, doing little characters and made some stuff that they sell on their d pop and it's it's a lot of fun. And also their little sis is getting into it as well. Super super super cool and very functional because, as we're going to get into it allows you to do.
Things like repair your own socks, which I fully support.
I think you know this is my eagle scout, weird survivalist stuff coming out. But historically in the United States there was this gender divide on household skills, right, And one of the things that I maintain is mission critical is if you were dude, you need to know how to sew. You need to know just a little bit about that art of stringing and nodding stuff, so you can like darn your socks, as we say, or you can fix a duvet cover.
Or stitch up a wound. They're very related skills. Sorry, I've been watching a lot of The Pit lately. I got over my ick factor and boil boy do I love that show. But if you have an aversion to slicing, dicing, and blood, not for you, although I do have those things, and I again kind of pushed through it because the
characters are just so incredible. Today's episode comes to us by way of our brand new research associate Marie Yeah, who absolutely wreckshop with this two part research brief, and I'm just gonna go ahead and knock it out of the way. The title that they headlined it with is when Stitch and Bitch was more like Stitch and Snitch.
I had not heard Stitch and Bitch until recently. It is kind of I guess this idea of like a group sitting around and sewing and knitting and stitching while also you know, commiserating about the state of affairs.
Yeah, it's it's a new way of saying the traditional like knitting circle, which was very common, or like you know, you have a bunch of people get together and sew up quilts from leftover, leftover fabric. It is still, by the way, it is still technically better to stitch up a wound. Don't be a dummy like me.
Uh did you knit up your wound with like wool?
I had to duct tape once you know what duct tape. That's probably not the best one. But I do hear super glue?
Is it? Preuper glue works if you have it, Yeah, I keep it in. But anyway, let's okay, we got to get to this. This is a phenomenal story. So if you cast your memory back, fellow ridiculous historians, to World Wars one and two, then you see a lot of American society reassessing what they saw as the traditional
roles of a household. So if you're an American woman back in the war periods, it was considered your patriotic duty to do things like volunteer for the Red Cross, uh to enter the workforce, which was a tremendous opportunity that had not been provided in the past. And then you had to keep on top of rationing and you know, your ration cards grow a victory garden and knitting because you couldn't just go to Woolworst and buy stuff who could afford it at the time.
Also turns out wool Worst does not just sell woolen woolen goods. This is much more of a catch all kind of store. I'm joking that wasn't even funny, but it's true. Ben Rosie the Riveter was a huge campaign aimed at getting you know, women to enter the workforce. I will say, I think this is obvious everybody. It is kind of one of those things where it was
sort of by necessity. It wasn't like this egalitarian moment of like you know, wilingness, where all of a sudden men were like, you know what, women should be able to occupy the same jobs as us. No, all the men were just off at war and those jobs needed filling.
Yeah. Yeah, So the powers that be said, we have to keep our factories open, correct to fight the Nazis and so on. But that did fundamentally change us society. We also know this is a story that might be familiar to some of us. Well, no, there's this long tradition of making do with what you have, repairing things rather than replacing things. So for quite a long time, millions of women, especially in the United States and the
world overall. We're knitting, but they weren't knitting recreationally. It was not a S and B hangout necessarily, it was an economic necessity to keep your families clothing in good repair. It reminds me of the Great Depression, horrible name, the period of time when yeah, flower MANU, I can't let it go. Flower manufacturers realized that less well to do families were taking sacks of flower and making these amazing dresses for their kids from them, and so they started
providing more aesthetic, pleasing patterns. We know that during war, millions of women in the United States and abroad were also knitting stuff for the troops. Like you would volunteer for the Red Cross, as we said, but you would also maybe volunteer to make warm clothing and socks and scarves and gloves for soldiers. You would even knit bandages.
I want to say, similar with Gingham, right, the Gingham craze, where that was originally used as more of a household fabric, you know, for tablecloths and curtains and things like that, but then it became one of those we got a lot of the stuff around, let's make it into dresses, and then kind of became a little bit chic in its own in its own right.
Yeah, Oh, I like that. I like that citation there too. Man, We okay, we know this. It became for a time during during the war periods, it became pretty common to see women knitting at all times constantly. Like people blame Pokemon Go. When that first came out, you would see folks maybe on a lunch break from their factory job and they'd be knitting. Or you might see somebody knitting
while they're literally walking to or from a destination. But as it turns out, and we can't thank our research associate Maria enough for this, some of those people knitting during the war years weren't just doing altruistic things to make sure people had scarves or to make sure people didn't have to buy a new set of socks. They were knitting as a form of espionage.
Whoa right, true man, I did know about this, but I still have to drop the woe because it's wild. There's so much stuff in these episodes that absolutely took me by surprise. We're going to get into the idea of binary code and secret messages and all of this kind of stuff, not to mention spying for the enemy.
So one thing that's I think important when it comes to spying is having a front that on its surface can be seen as unthreatening and innocuous and something that would typically be overlooked.
And a ladies knitting group is one.
Of those things because of misogyny exactly, but also it reminds me of the monopoly board games that were used to help people escape pow camps. Yeah, you nailed it there. Some spies use their knowledge of knitting and the fact that knitting was seen as so ubiquitous and innocuous that they were able to sneak hidden messages encoded in their artwork. Sometimes this was a form of what we call steganography, which is weaving a message physically into an ordinary object like a hair tie or.
A scarf, or that perhaps stitched into the lining of a cod Things like that. Yeah, Yeah, that's something we've talked about.
Yeah, exactly.
And sometimes also it would be a great cover because you could be a spy carrying a message, but to enemy forces, you're just an average person carrying a knitting bag with yarn and needles inside. And as Maria says, heavens no nothing else at all.
Honestly here, So let's talk about how wartime spies used knitting to get the job done. This cover that we're talking about, it couldn't have happened if not for the absolute boom in popularity of at home knitting kits or
what have you. Women answered the call to knit your bit, which was a slogan that originated as a World War One era American Red Cross campaign doing things like you mentioned earlier, repairing the linings of helmets, knitting fingerless gloves for the troops, repairing things stuff like that.
Knit your bit.
So take this thing you already know how to do, and use it in more time to further you know, the mission of the troops.
By the way, I love the wartime slang, the wartime initiatives that were all sort of propagandistic, even you know, even for the good guys there was stuff like keep mum, she's not so dumb, that said, don't talk to don't talk loosely because you underestimate women, they might be spies or careless talk costs lives.
Loose lips sink chips.
Loose slips sink ships. That's a banger, Keep calm and carry on. Of course that was the British.
That was just the overarching attitude of the Brits right right life philosophy.
Even last one dig for victory, which is when you were supposed to cultivate a garden.
So the victory, Yeah, the aforementioned victory gardens. So we're seeing a golden age of knitting in the nineteen forties and a lot of that had to do with this whole another slogan, make do and mend and of course the previously mentioned knit your bit mentality that swept the country. So on November twenty fourth of nineteen forty one, people were seeing the new issue of Life magazine coming out, displaying a full size photo of a woman knitting, with
one short headline how to knit. Included you would find the basic instructions for knitting, and it came with a pattern, not for some sort of doily or some sort of you know dress for a military vest.
Hmm, yeah, right, it's not it's not what you would expect from previous iterations or patterns, but it also is completely in line with the skill set of knitting. You also saw the big to dos or prominent people of the day endorsing knitting. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was kind of the Kardashian of the age, right the first Lady of the United States at the time. Her PR team often made sure to photograph her knitting, and she had a knitting tea party that kicked off the World War Two knitting effort.
Knit for Defense over there at the super humble Waldorf Astoria in New York City. That happened in September of nineteen forty one. Eleanor Roosevelt not to be confused with Eleanor Rigby, who was darning her socks in the night.
When there's nobody there.
This Eleanor became known as the first knitter of the land, and New York Times reported on January twenty second, nineteen forty two, a helmet for a flying cadet made by some devoted woman in a small town far from the war is sure to arouse interest in the navy or air force among the friends of the women doing the knitting, and she herself feels that she is an active part in the vast conflict. She is not useless, although she can do nothing else to help win the war. No,
that's not good copying like that. It was it was doing so, it was going so, well.
Yeah, I'll find the journalist so and then we see that again, this is ubiquitous. The eleanor Rigby reference is great because it shows us how fundamental knitting and darning became, right,
how abiquitous in this time in society. Later, it's June eighteenth, nineteen forty five, so just you know, like three years later, General Dwight Eisenhower calls upon the American Cross and Volunteer knitting efforts, referring to them as the friendly hand of this nation, reaching across the sea to sustain it's fighting men, fighting men. Right, But that's okay, So this is a good idea. It's a group effort. Everybody get together to
fight the baddies. This also means that knitting in wartime becomes not a hobby, it becomes a patriotic duty, and that makes it ubiquitous. That makes it so commonplace that if you are a secret agent, you can blend right in as you do your dirty deeds of trade craft.
Yeah, done dirt cheap indeed, And before anyone, you know, gets on our case about you know, looking at the pass through a modern lens. Uh And so yeah, I think it's a thing that you do. It's just a thing that you do. I don't know that we have to give a pass instantly. Just you know, some of this stuff is a little problematic, but at the same time.
It's it was. It was progressive for the time for sure.
Sure it was regressive, progressive for the time, let's keep it. But it was also very again condescending. You know, like, look at these ladies working in a factory just like a dude, and oh uh oh, I'm the high eluding New York Times. Women, you can't do anything, but you're not useless because you can knit. I would be so
irritated by the media of the day, you know. But like you were saying, no, we've got to we've got to note some things that come up in our previous explorations on the science and art of trade craft, which is house spy spy in our sister show stuff they don't want you to know. There's a great shout out here that Maria gives us.
I love this one. It's such a good scene center. I think people might be familiar with a Tale of Two Cities, right, It was the best of times in the worst of times, and a really important character in that book was Defarge, a very powerful woman, but yes hidden, hiding in plain sight and exercising her power in the shadows, which is kind of by design.
Right, So let's set the stage. Madame Defarge Tale of Two Cities. She sits outside of her wine shop in Paris, and she knits a scarf. But for those who know what to look for, there are messages in that scarf. She is secretly stitching hidden names, creating, again with steganography, not stenography, steganography a register of aristocrats and enemies that are going to later be executed by the guillotine during
the French Revolution. And even though this is an excellent fictional character, the use of coded knitting is real, and we know that actual genuine spies in the real world, people like Elizabeth Betley and Phyllis Lettour, did indeed take a page from Madame Defarge and conceal messages in their knitting projects.
Yeah, that's part of the resistance. So let's just talk.
A little bit about the the procedural aspects of knitting and involves interconnecting sliding loops of yarn used to create stitches that form a textile aka piece of fabric made from interwoven pieces of yarn or thread or what have you. There are two very important fundamental kinds of stitches that go into this craft.
Yeah, You've got the knit stitches k and it stitches, and they resemble the letter V in that fabric. And then you've got the pearl stitches puurl that are a reverse knit stitch. Those are the things that look like bumps in the fabric. So you got your v's in your bumps one hundred percent. And it turns out that you can use those v's and bumps as ways of incorporating hidden messages through the use of what I mentioned earlier,
something called binary code. Think about Morse code. Very simple building blocks.
Of these types of code, whether it be ones and z zos or dots and dashes, right.
Yeah, exactly.
And this can sound more complex than maybe it actually was. In practice. You could use, to your point in lil stitches as kind of a data marker. So you purl a stitch right, you make a bump, and that represents the arrival of a certain person. But you drop a stitch, creating a hole in your fabric, and that may represent the person leaving. So you really it depends on what kind of signals you want to send and what the
complexity or sophistication of those signals would be. So for example, in this in this hypothetical scenario, the person who is trying to recover this information already knows, you know, like Lord Batten von ham On Sandwich is the person they're looking for to arrive or depart. So now if you are our knitting spy, you don't have to figure out a way to use bumps and v's to spell out
the name Lord Matton Mountain ham On Sandwich. You just have to say the person we're looking for has arrived, the person we're looking for is gone.
It's brilliant for sure, and I mean and this type of code is still very much in use today. Ones and zeros used to encode things like images in digital form JPEGs, our audio in digital form MP three's. If you stripped it down to their fundamental layers, you're going to see series of binary code used to encode things from the analog world into digital form. So almost all modern digital computer data interactions depend on binary code. So
binary is very much the same as knitting. These combinations of ones and zeros or v's and bumps or dots and dashes. In hand knitting, knit one pearl one represented as K one P one is a fundamental technique for the craft, and it is also inherently a binary system in machine based knitting that's used you know, to mass
mass produce things. Patterns are in fact defined by ones and zeros or yes no logic, which are very much the same exact building blocks that would go into the fundamentals of computing.
And research Associate Maria, please don't We're not the brightest crayons in the box, but don't think your your joke escaped. I noticed there you have this titled as K one P three, which is a common knitting instruction, So our research associated is sending us a code and a puzzle as well. Yeah yeah, this, I mean I love this stuff. Man.
This lends itself naturally to hiding messages In things like Morse code, the system of dots and dashes, you can use knit and pearl stitch combinations to spell out a hidden message within something as simple as a hairtie. Your pearl stitch can be a dot, and then three consecutive pearl stitches could represent a dash. So if you needed to actually spell out the name of Lord montbatten ham On von ham On Sandwich, then you could do it
by employing Morse code via fabric. There were also things we could call cousins of this tactic knoed yarn or specific yarn color changes knitted into a fabric. So then instead of having to have a bunch of pearls and v's or bumps and v's, you could just change a specific part of the fabric color or the thread or the yard. That could also very efficiently provide the signals you needed.
So let's talk a little bit about knotted threads in this instance, spies with hide messages by tying little knots into strands of yarn, with each knot placement representing a unique code. So the knotted thread could be an espionage tool in its own right, but it could also be cast onto knitting needles right and turned into a knitting project carried out by a secret agent in a knitting bag.
So for the knotted.
Message to be read, the receiver would also have to first know how to unravel the scar which is almost like what do they call that, like a sifer, not a cipher, But there's like the key that you need in.
Order to trek a one time pad.
So I don't know something like that.
I guess I'm just thinking about the you know, when we're talking about things like the famous Enigma computer system that was I believe Alan Turning had something to do with there. You know, there is like a sort of there's a name, God damn it, what is the name where you in order to like have it's like a specific.
It's a one time pad, right, the way number stations work today, you have to have the cryptographic key.
Cryptographic key, I think is the term that I was poorly digging for, but it's something along those lines. You kind of have to in order to even interpret the thing kind of have to have a key. And that is sort of what this is. The ability to unravel that scarf and to know what you're looking for and.
To jump in real quick Noel as your reference. Turing, the one of the greatest wartime achievements ever done is he cracked the Enigma exactly considered impossible to do, which and I think it was one of these things too, where they cracked it and then they were able to keep it under wraps that they cracked it right.
Yeah, by hiding, by feeding, like what's the word phony intel to the end.
One hundred percent, which is why people think carrots are still good for your eyesight. It's not untrue, but it was a way to cover up the early use of radar.
Was that actually part of the Enigma code? Or is those just parallel the same time.
It was parallel.
I'm just talking about the the great game of deception there. But we do have to shout out whenever we talk about the legendary Alan Turing. Two things you need to know about him is that this guy was so brilliant. We don't know whether anybody else could have figured out Enigma. He had those moments of revelation, you know, they're almost prophetic. And then secondly, most importantly, I would say he did later get betrayed by his own country due to his sexual orientation.
Oh for sure, we've done an episode on this very topic. We had to we know, certainly certainly did.
We did an episode about We did a two part series about scientists who are persecuted for being despite being completely correct and turning. Got an episode there you go.
Oh that's right. Yeah, yeah, and then we also.
Get pardoned posthumously by Queen Elizabeth.
Oh great.
Unfortunately Queen Elizabeth the second was also the Queen when.
When it all went down. Yeah, and okay, so we've got we're to get to here. This is weirdly enough, We're going to revisit this idea of nodded threads in our second part of this series, and it's going to take us away from World War two to the ancient past. But for now, consider that a teaser. There was this beautiful appeal to a lot of people in society of espionage through knitting, because you're kind of doing something very secret in very open places that you've got the ability
to stick it to the man. Some knitters are knitting in public. Some are going to specific almost like a dead drop, you know, like walk by the park, see the lady knitting a scarf. If the scarf has a yellow stripe, get out if the scarf has a blue stripe, then proceed to the next location and you can meet you know. Blah blah blah blah blah.
For sure, and a story that is often passed around, you know, and as we know a lot of these stories, there's some apocrypha involved. This one is told mainly the same way, and it goes like this. During World War Two, the Belgian resistance harnessed the power of knitting. Here is the variance though some versions say one woman, some say elderly woman, some say women.
Okay, So so it differs in that it may be a solo or group activity, and if it's solo, the descriptions of the woman in question differ a little.
Bit for sure.
So knitters would do a little train watching, a little train spotting, standing by watching the trains pass and encoding the movement of German troops and artillery into the fabric.
So dropping a stitch to your previous point been indicated one type of train, perling a stitch indicated a different type of train and their fabric, which was embedded with this logistical information about the enemy would then be passed along to intelligence officers who were given the tools they needed to decode these messages.
Gentlemen, I am but a humble purveyor of scarves. I travel often so that I'm laughing because I get picture that being what are those crazy word to the wise things that military folks told themselves in the day. They were like, look, we need to round up anybody who's selling scarves.
We need to do it now. Well, that's the problem, right or not?
Not?
The problem with the potential problem. This stuff only works for as long as the enemy is not wise to not necessarily the code, but just the medium. And once that gets, you know, out of the handbag, then all bets are off.
I'm just imagining you, guys. I'm imagining this globe trotting scarf salesperson who is going in and out of different countries during wartime and never gets caught. There could be one today that we don't know about. However, we know that there are specific cases of legendary knitting spies. They didn't necessarily just convey hidden messages in fabric. They could also use their knitting tools to hide physical notes or documents.
And you know what, now that I think about it as a last resort, just like hatpins, your knitting needles could be used as weapons.
Oh yeah, and we're going to get into some specific case of individuals who were experts at deploying this type of tradecraft in the second part of this two part.
Series, so please tune in, folks, We're going to dive into, as Noel said, some specific cases of legendary knitting spies joined us later this week. In the meantime, big thanks to our super producer, mister Max Williams. Big thanks to our research associate Maria who else who else.
Who is well, Christian Rossiotis and native Jeff Code here in spirit of course Alex Williams to composed this Bang and.
Bob, also doctor Rachel Big Spinach, Lance of course, a j. Bahamas Jacobs, and a civil but chilly acknowledgement of Jonathan Stricklands aka the Quist.
Find how do you Do? Indeed a Kurt nod adopting of the of the Camps. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.