Iwhat I believe a very rare and extremely interesting wax doll.The doll in question has been verified as dating from 1860 when the Great Eastern Steam ship which was designed and built by Isambard Brunel was launched in Millwall, London. It is a wax shoulder head on a wooden carved body with blown glass pupiless eyes set into the wax face. It has a small red bow painted mouth well defined nose and eyebrows and wears a black wig tied at the back in a pony tail. He wears the correct sailor’s uniform from that era, although the front of the costume is deteriorating. It is of dark blue silk and has small anchors depicted on it. The back of the costume is perfect complete with the sailors collar… The cardboard black hat (similar to a boater) bears the name “The Great Eastern” around the band – making it almost certain this could be an early mascot for such a great ship?- if so this precedes Norah Wellings mascot liner dolls by a considerable number of years, making it surely one of the first. He measures 10 inches long.
The story of the Great Eastern is as follows:
In 1858 Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed the 19,000 ton Great Eastern Steam liner. It was to be his masterpiece at the time and he nicknamed his BABE. She was so big that she had to be launched sideways. She was built this size to house 2,000 passengers in order to sail direct from Europe to Australia without refuelling until she reached Calcutta. Her length was 6890 feet. Brunel actually decided not to send her to Australia in the end but take her on the transatlantic run.
On June 17th 1860, she made her maiden voyage to New York and received a stunning 14 cannon salute. She had, 15000 people visiting this massive vessel and over 2,000 people took short cruises on her although she had only 200 actual berths at the time. She could actually carry 2,000 passengers. She had several nasty accidents whilst afloat and because of this started to lose money. There was a terrible explosion and the large funnel blew off, launching like a rocket, scalding the men inside – one of them throwing himself overboard, sadly being mangled to death by the great blade wheels. Brunel had a stroke on receiving the news and never recovered.
In 1865 the second transatlantic cable was to be laid across the ocean but no ship was big enough to carry such an enormous cable except the Great Eastern. She accomplished all her missions with the cable laying and in 1888 she was scrapped for £16,000.
When taking her apart a skeleton was discovered inside her double bottom. He was one of the workman that had built the ship in the 1850’s. Was it him that had cursed the Great Eastern when he realised that no one could hear him or let him out? Was it he that brought misery to this wonderful feat of engineering the GREAT EASTERN?
I wonder if anyone else owns another such a doll, I would be very interested and delighted to know especially in the USA where the ship spent most of its time? If anyone has any information regarding this wax doll please let me know.