Color: A Natural History of the Palette (46 page)

The question is, was
vitrum
a reference to woad or was it something quite different like glass—the blue paint the Ancient Egyptians used, perhaps? It is impossible to know, but we can be certain that two thousand years ago woad had arrived in Britain—some seed pods were recently found in a pre-Roman grave at Dragonby in Humberside—and it is a fact that the Britons had something of a reputation for body paint. In his
Natural History
Pliny (who was right about things almost as often as he was wrong) asserted that the Britons used a plant called “glaustum” to make themselves blue.
²
Indeed, he continued, young women used to stain the whole of their bodies with it and then process naked at religious ceremonies, their skin “resembling that of Ethiopians.” But this time, in 51 A.D., no religious ceremonies (nude or otherwise) seemed able to appease the Celtic gods. Over the previous nine years, since they landed in 43 A.D., the Romans had proved to be unstoppable as they moved slowly up the country, and Caractacus had become a guerrilla leader.

There are two ways in which the half-naked Britons in his small army could have stained themselves with woad, and they encapsulate the problems that dyers using woad and other indigo plants have struggled with over the centuries. Because the curious thing about these crops is that despite their reputation they cannot easily be made into dyes. If you take the green leaves of the first-year growth of the woad plant (the second year it contains almost no indigo), crush them, macerate them and leave them to ferment and dry, you can make a blue compost. I once tried painting my body with woad compost suspended in alcohol. But the part that I had daubed on my arms disappeared with the sweat of the first hill I walked up—which suggests the color might have been too temporary for battle—although inexplicably the woad that I had painted onto my feet lasted in uneven blotches for several days, attracting concerned comments about my “bruises.”

However, if Caractacus’s dyers had really wanted to fix the woad as a dye they would have had to go through a complicated and almost mystical chemical process
³
with their vats, down in the Iron Age village that you can still just see signs of at the bottom of the hill. They would first have had to remove the oxygen from the vat—by fermenting or “reducing” it—after which the liquid that remained would have been a yellowish color. The magic of indigo is that the blue color only appears
after
the object being dyed (whether it is a textile or an arm) is taken out of the pot, and meets the air again.

And this second way—smearing blue-green scum (which had been scooped off the top of the pot, and which smelled like rotten pondweed) onto their pale torsos—is perhaps the method the Ancient Britons used to dye themselves a semi-permanent blue. But why would they have done it? Was it just to scare the Romans—or would that ritual painting have had other purposes? One possible reason for warriors to use woad is a highly practical one—it is an extraordinary astringent. Wearing it into battle is rather like rubbing on Savlon
before
walking through a cactus plantation, and having it available after battle is like preparing a primitive field hospital in advance. The liveliest proof that I have heard of woad’s miraculous healing ability comes from a tattoo expert in Santa Barbara, California. Pat Fish has punctured thousands of Celtic crosses onto human skin since she learned to use tattoo needles in the early 1980s. Actually she’s done most designs except the Devil (“Anyone who would feel comfortable with Satan on their skin I don’t feel comfortable with touching their skin”). But the one thing she will never make again is a tattoo out of woad.

“It was about five years ago,” Fish said when I called her. Her client had a theory that Caractacus and other Celtic warriors had woad tattoos—and he decided to test it out on his own body. Woad was forbidden in California, because it is such a weed, so the man made it into a tincture and mailed it from his home in Canada. “He was scared to take it over the border by car with him, just in case he was caught.” It was rather endearing, she agreed, that a man covered in macho body markings should be afraid of violating a local bylaw. Fish tattooed a Celtic knot on his ankle, using the tincture as a pigment. On day one, it looked good, but two days later the leg started to swell. “On the fourth day things were worse. We went to the doctor, who said, Oh, Pat, what
did
you do?” she remembered. It was then that she learned that woad was so good for wounds that it had healed the punctures from her needles and allowed the skin to reject its own pigment. “There was this shiny pink tissue all raised on his ankle in the shape of a Celtic knot. I’ve never seen such a perfect scar. But there was no blue in it at all.”

The man’s theory was not altogether unfounded, however—indigo from various plants has been used in tattoos as far afield as Nigeria and Persia, although probably not in tincture form, and some historians have suggested that Caractacus may not have needed to paint himself from a fermenting woad vat because he was already permanently painted. In the 1980s a number of bodies were discovered in the Lindow peat bogs in Cheshire, near Manchester. They caused considerable excitement—one murder suspect even confessed to killing his wife—before scientists identified the bodies as having lived in 300 B.C. Very cautiously—because the bodies were rotten, and the peat contained its own trace minerals—archaeologists confirmed that metals had been found on the skin of at least one body, and speculated that the Celts may have been covered with blue tattoos.
⁴

Tattoos in European culture have often represented stepping outside the boundaries of society, whether to indicate bravery, piety (Armenian Christians used to mark themselves to show they had made an important pilgrimage), impiety (one of the paintings in William Hogarth’s satirical
Marriage à la Mode
at the National Gallery in London shows a woman with a tattoo etched onto her breast: his eighteenth-century audience would have recognized this as a sign of a convicted criminal), machismo (in Hong Kong, Triad members can be identified by their dragon tattoos) or simply eccentricity. And the pigments they have used have been just as varied as the social signals they have given. The Tahitians used to make their tattoo pigments out of burned coconut husks; native American tribesmen used to put spiders’ webs and burned fern ash into their tattoos; Maoris used to mix soot made from burned caterpillar corpses mixed with fish oil
⁵
for their sacred mokos, while European sailors have tended to use charcoal soot for the “indigo” color (black on pale skin tends to go blue), or even gunpowder— which burns into human skin leaving permanent marks.

The arrival of brighter colors on the tattooist’s palette coincided with Impressionism. As artists queued up to buy new paints for depicting dancers or water lilies, tattooists were experimenting with the same colors for making mermaids and roses. One of the first tattooists in the U.K. to experiment with new colors was a famous artist called George Burchett. The story is that Burchett was one of the first to try Winsor & Newton’s Winsor Blue and Winsor Green paints. When Burchett died in 1953 his company continued to sell pigments bought from L. Cornelissen & Sons artists’ supplies shop in London—according to Lionel Titchener, who is head of the Tattoo Club of Great Britain and also founder of the British Tattoo History Museum in Oxford which, when I visited, was in an untidy state in his back room, owing to artifact overflow. Titchener confirmed that by the late 1950s, U.K. tattooists were beginning to import pigments from the United States—they had all gone through a laboratory test to make sure they were safe. And by the mid 1970s very few tattooists were using artists’ pigments for their colors. “In the early 1970s, Ronald Scutt published his book
Skin Deep, the mystery of tattooing
,” Titchener told me. “He did some research on the pigments, and sent me a list of Winsor & Newton colors that he considered were safe to use for tattooing.” The colors used today are similar to the Winsor Blue and Green used in the old days “but today they are all laboratory tested, to check for any harmful impurities.”

Titchener has recently become a consultant to the European Union—which has expressed its intention to limit the pigments used on Euro-tatts. However, the problem is twofold. First, there is something about tattooing that is all about
not
being part of a world that bureaucrats can bind up in red tape.
⁶
Second, the onus is on the tattooists to prove the pigments are safe “and no chemist in the world will put it in writing: they are much too afraid of getting sued.” As for Caractacus, if he did have tattoos they would probably have been colored with copper pigments, or perhaps iron. Either way the European Union would probably not have approved.

WOAD AND THE MIDDLE CLASSES

It was in fact a European Union-style protectionist policy which caused the greatest problems for indigo merchants wanting to introduce their new dye into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Nobody had bargained for the intense lobbying power of the middle-class woad growers. The medieval German city of Erfurt, including its university, was built on this blue, while many of the most splendid houses in Toulouse were also constructed on the profits from woad. The outside of Amiens Cathedral in northern France shows two woad merchants, carrying a huge sack of blue— testifying to the wealth of the dyers who could afford to help sponsor the construction of the church. The first part of the woad-making process involves taking the fresh leaves, grinding them to a pulp, rolling them into balls the size of large apples and then leaving them to dry in the sun. The French call them
cocagne
, and even today “
pays de cocagne
” (which can rather prosaically be translated as “woad balls country”) is a popular metaphor for a land of riches.

“I had men and horses, arms and wealth. What wonder if I parted with them reluctantly?” asked Caractacus some months after his defeat on the Welsh borders, in a famous speech requesting clemency that resulted in him being pardoned and allowed to stay in Rome as a celebrity exile.
⁷
But 1,500 years later middle-class merchants in Europe were damned if they were going to have to say something similar to the indigo merchants. Of course they fought back—and at the beginning it looked as if they were winning. In 1609 the French government attached the death penalty to the use of indigo rather than woad. In Germany the dyers made annual declarations that they did not use the “devil’s dye.” However, anyone wanting to ban indigo had the problem that—once the dyeing was finished—it was impossible to detect which of the two blues had been used. So the defenders of woad had to rely on the dyers’ honor and—perhaps more reliably—on the gossiping of neighbors.

In England the woad lobbyists managed to get indigo certified as poisonous—it isn’t—and because of this it was officially banned until 1660. Nobody paid much attention, however: in England there was less support for woad than on the Continent as most was imported. It was not that woad did not grow well, but the problem was the drying: the prevailing wind is from the southwest and it seems to bring most of the Atlantic with it.
⁸
In Britain the law was cheerfully defied from at least the 1630s onward as the gentlemen of the East India Company made sure the dyers of blue were amply supplied with the illegal Indian import. Woad was fine for coloring wool, people found, although adding Asian indigo to the woad vat resulted in a cheaper and stronger color. But to dye the cotton that was now beginning to arrive from India, dyers realized they most certainly needed the stronger vat that came from imported indigo. Most blue vats in Europe were, in fact, a mixture of the two plant extracts.

The commercial dealings of the East India Company men were, reluctantly, supported by the Puritans. What could these stern wearers of black and white do, after all, to get their dark clothes darker and their white clothes whiter? For while woad or indigo are important as “bottom” colors for black dyes (to stop the logwood black from fading quickly in the sunlight) another factor is their ability, in the form of laundry blue, to give white clothes a new lease on life. In poorer parts of India you can sometimes see older gentlemen in the streets radiating what seems to be ultraviolet from their white clothes. A taxi driver in Delhi explained it to me one day: “In India white clothes have to be washed so many times that in the end they are quite blue.” But what a very admirable blue, he added proudly, “and so much better than throwing old white clothes away as you do in your European countries.”

Despite the energetic promotion of indigo from the mid-seventeenth century in Europe, woad wasn’t wiped out—quite. For years it was still often used as a base dye in indigo vats to help the fermentation process—as recently as the 1930s it was used with indigo to dye police uniforms in Britain, and in the past few years the European Union has backed a £2.2 million project to (in its own words) act as “an agronomic blueprint” to establish natural indigo as a commercial product, used in paints, textile dyeing and printing inks. The ten partners—from England, Germany, Finland, Italy and Spain—of this “Spindigo” project are experimenting with woad and other indigo plants to try to overcome the problem that both the supply and quality of natural indigo tend to be inconsistent. This is the possible future for woad. But by the late seventeenth century woad was mainly out, and indigo was very much in.

INDIGO IN THE OTHER INDIES

Many years after hearing my father’s stories of the indigo plantation I found myself in Calcutta. And I couldn’t resist visiting the Tollygunge club. The colonnaded white building was being restored. Men dressed in grubby white dhoti loincloths hung off ladders and swung on chandeliers to restore this place to the grandeur it felt it deserved. There was a distant shout of “fore” from the golf course, and the chef was serving mulligatawny soup and lamb with mint sauce for lunch. But of the indigo—or rather of my childhood vision of indigo—I saw no sign at all. Perhaps I had missed it because I was looking for trees, and as I was to learn later it actually grows as a shrub. But probably it had simply disappeared from view, just as in the early 1600s indigo disappeared from the list of major export commodities from India.