| The history of baskets starts, I
usually say, with Adam and Eve: In Paradise Eve learned
to plait her hair, and in the same way she made a basket
so she could transport fruit to the place where Adam and
she usually slept. Perhaps the basket was the only thing
they took with them out of Paradise. In any case, they
took the idea with them, and so culture was born. Since
then, baskets have existed in many shapes, made of many
kinds of materials. I live in Denmark, but my ancestors
came from southern Sweden, from whence they brought a
special kind of basket to Denmark. My family settled here
and, contrary to custom, made the baskets here instead of
importing them from Sweden. The kind of basket I am
talking about, in English is called a splint-basket, and
in Danish spånkurv. A splint-basket is made of
4-10 cm broad splints of pine which are plaited and
collected by some kind of nails with two rims, inside and
outside, and provided with a handle. Before 1960 it was
the cheapest basket to use in the house and in the
garden. Nowadays in Europe that kind of splint basket is
produced in large quantities in Poland, and you can buy
them both in Sweden and Denmark. They are made to be sold
cheaply, so the handle is poorly made, but the ground
material, the pine-splints, is often very strong. There
is no one in Denmark who produces this kind of basket
today, or does so only as a hobby, I presume. But, in
Sweden you find basket-makers who are still going strong.
Not in the old fashion way, however, because today we
expect these baskets to be handicraft. So they use much
more care, and these baskets are not cheap! In the Dalarne region in Sweden, 200 km
north of Stockholm, they started in about 1830 to make
splint baskets, perhaps inspired by the Finnish baskets.
I have recently discovered a fresco dating from about
1520 in the curch of Rasbokil in Uppland, Sweden, where
you can see 12 splint baskets of the Finnish type which
illustrate Matthew Chapter 14 v 19-21. So far as I know,
this is the earliest evidence of the existence of splint
baskets.
The parish Våmhus is the main place
for the production in Dalarne. The baskets were made at
home and sold around Sweden, especially in Stockholm.
Often makers brought the raw materials with them. Several
people would work together, but only one person made the
whole basket. In about 1845 this inspired a person in the
southern part of Sweden, and production started there. In
contrast to Dalarne, the production in Skåne was
rationalized. The main place for this production was a
parish called Örkened, maintown Lönsboda, today a part
of Osby District. This will also explain the difference
between the handicraft of the north and the industry of
the south: 1. In Skåne they made the
splints with a plane, where in Dalarne they used a knife
and split the wood along the grain. 2. In Skåne
they used a nailing machine to fasten the inner and outer
rims and the handle, whereas in Dalarne they tied it up
with a narrow splint, or fastened it by hammering in
nails.Handles were made by starting at one end of the
wood to make three or four splints, which you do not
split free at the other end. This will allow you to bow
the handle and place first the one end in the side of the
basket and nail it, and then the other end in the
opposite side and nail this. 3. 1
and 2 gave the division of labour which
made mass production possible.
Even the basket makers of Skåne
wandered around northern Europe selling the baskets in
Denmark, Norway, Germany,and England.
In England in the 1880s there were perhabs 12 to 14
Swedish splint basket salesmen, who competed with each
other, but in 1903 they decided to co-operate by making a
firm called the Swedish Basket Company. Four af the
salesmen lived in Hull: Olof Myrberg, Olof Olsson and the
Nilsson brothers. The fifth, Bengt Nilsson, was from
Grimsby. The firm was dissolved in 1911.
Many settled down in Germany after 1880 and made
factories.
A few also made factories in the USA, as did two brothers
in Minneapolis, James S. Sandberg and his brother Bengt.
A third brother, Martin, joined the brother James in
1890, and moved later on to Duluth, Minnesota. In 1904 he
ended up in Los Angeles, where he called his firm the
Pacific Coast Basket Factory. Martin closed the
production of baskets in 1920 and started up with
furniture.
In Denmark the government tried to stop the Swedish
basket-sellers, and did so in 1890 with a statutory
instrument which forbade them to go around selling
splint-baskets. The consequence of this was that the
Swedes settled down in Denmark as wholesale dealers of
splint-baskets! Carl Johansson did so in 1891 at a place
called Kvistgård, and his brother, who is my
grand-father, came to Denmark in the year 1900 to join
him. Before this, my grandfather had been the manager of
a splint-basket factory in Wolgast,
Germany for 11 years. In the year 1902 the brothers
moved the factory to Lillerød, approx. 30 km north of
Copenhagen, a place today called Allerød. Carl Johansson
was the dealer and my grandfather Per Martin Johansson
was the manufacturer. This system was carriet on by their
children until 1956, when my father Arvid Johansson,
until then manufacturer, also became the dealer! Carl
changed his surname to Johansen, which is the Danish
spelling, and thus he could advertise: The only Danish
splint basket factory!
The days of glory for the splint-baskets was the
period 1890-1950, when millions of splint- baskets were
produced and sold. From 1902-1970 the main part of the
Danish-produced splint baskets were produced in
Lillerød. Many splint-baskets were imported from Skåne,
without the handle. The handle was then obtained in
Denmark through a dealer. The custom-duties were less on
the baskets as semi-manufactured, and the transportation
was easier. In this way we had three competitors, Persson
in Copenhagen, Elmose and later his son-in-law Gertsen in
Aarhus, Jutland, and the son of Elmose in Odense, Fuen.
In about 1950 we and they together provided the Danish
market with at least one million splint baskets a year,
and at that time the population of Denmark was about 4
million. It was not handicraft, but a blind alley in the
industrial evolution. It is therefore an amusing fact,
that in Sweden you call a plastic bag kasse, which
was the usual word to describe a splint basket. In my
childhood I thought it was a dialect word from Örkened,
but in fact its origin is Finnish. A plastic bag is just
the carry tool which replaced the splint basket in this
region of the world. Today a splint basket is more often
used as an icon for something nice, old fashioned, ease
& peace, peacefully gardening etc., than seen in the
real world.
NOTES:
1. In april 1981 the former Algonkin-chief
Wiiliam Commanda from the River Desert
reservation in Canada came to Denmark with his
wife to demonstrate the art of building a
traditional algonkin-huntcanoe wabanaki tciman.
The ribs were made of Northern White Cedar by
splitting it along the grain. Unfortunately I was
not there to see it (but 10.000 others were
there!), but I saw the film afterwards, and it
was an odd feeling to hear that well known sound
from my childhood, when I saw a Native American
split the wood in the same way as my father did
when he made the rims for the splint baskets. If
Longfellow had seen this himself he could not
have said in this way, as he did in Hiawatha:
"Give me of your boughs, O Cedar!
Of your strong and pliant branches,"
-or perhaps is the splitting of the cedar a new
tradition? No one believes in Longfellow! Or
maybe the splitting is hidden in the words:
Down he hewed the boughs of Cedar
Shaped them strightway to a framework ... ?
This must bee a good long footnote!
2. In John Rice Irwin: Baskets and Basket
Makers in Southern Appalachia p. 177, I found
a remark about "my" basket. He calls it
The factory-made "market"
basket, and says (1982), "This basket is
still in common use." But until now I
have not managed to find any more US- literature
about this kind of basket.
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