Hair-Tearing Time for the Researcher
ISMACS News
April 1991
Issue 31
It's a Princess?
THERE ARE times when the conscientious researcher is want to tear out great tufts of his own hair with the frustrations of trying to unravel the complexity of the Victorian sewing-machine business.
This is just one such time.
I've just seen a story in an 1883 copy of the Journal of Appliances and Sewing Machine Gazette which makes me wonder if I'm certain about anything.
The Prima Donna machine comes in the fairly-rare category but there are a handful owned by ISMACS members, and it's well known that it was the hand machine manufactured by the Ipswich company of Whight & Mann in the 1870 and 80s to supplement the Excelsior and Alberta treadle models.
The story I mentioned earlier was about a Prima Donna. Or was it?
In an article about the pioneering Pitt Brothers of Liversedge Yorkshire, there's a picture of the company's Princess machine. Only it's not a Princess — it's a Prima Donna. Or is it?
What it certainly is, is a Prima Donna with the name Princess on it. All the features are there — the claw-foot sewing-table support, the craftily-formed sliders covering the shuttle and even the cover plate where the lower-drive shaft enters the main body.
Now it would be easy to explain this as yet another bit of badge engineering with Pitt buying from Whight and Mann and adding its own name. But that won't wash as the entire story is about the fine castings turned out from Pitt's foundry.
The only possibility that can make this researcher hang on to precarious sanity is that Whight gave up sewing-machine manufacture a year after the Pitt Brothers article. It could just be that as a prelude to this he sold off the patterns and tooling to Pitt who re-named the machine and continued its manufacture.
That's what I'm going to settle for — at least for now.