The clothespeg has an ancient look. The simplest sort, with rounded head and body carved from a single piece of wood, might have come from an Egyptian tomb or a Mesoamerican midden. Their shape is vaguely anthropomorphic, like a forked mandrake root (“dolly peg” is the name in commerce), suggesting an offering to the gods of fertility, or of nature. It would be no surprise to find one in an Iron Age settlement, still attached to an Iron Age loincloth.
Odd, then, that the first such peg is not recorded until the early 19th century. The Roman soldiers at Vindolanda, on Hadrian’s Wall, did not peg up the thick socks for which they wrote desperate letters home; Lady Macbeth’s maid did not peg up the damp, still-spotted gown. Even Samuel Pepys did not expect to see his shirt, soused after a session at the Cock in Fleet Street, tethered with small wooden clips to a line. Instead, the clothespeg came only just in time to pinion Shelley’s tear-stained handkerchiefs from the wild west wind.
Before this, it appears, drying garments were simply hung over a line (as painted on a wall in Pompeii), or spread out on grass, as shown in illuminated manuscripts of surprisingly tranquil and unsteady laundry days. For John Clare, the peasant-poet of industrialising England, hedges were as likely to be blowing with underwear as with the blossoms of the sloe or the wild cherry. The fierce spines of the blackthorn or hawthorn held a petticoat as well as anything.
Some say fishermen first thought up pegs, to clip their nets to the rigging. But only one name emerges from the sea-fog, that of Jérémie Victor Opdebec, who took out a patent for the dolly peg in 1809, and of whom nothing else is known. He sounds Belgian. According to a charming fake biography by a mid-20th-century French cabaret group, Les Quatre Barbus, he had a scientific bent from boyhood, inventing devices to de-pip currants and to muzzle ants, but it was the desperate sight (and the faint song) of too-light lingerie fluttering perilously on the line that inspired his biggest brainwave.
