Sometimes it's better not to buck a trend and just go with the flow. So, after a suggestion from Adrian McKinty, author of the newly released and wonderful The Cold Cold Ground, that someone should find out where Murphy beds came from, I decided a little reluctantly that I'd look into it. To be honest, I didn't think there would be anything very specific. No one seems to be able to track down with precision who made either the Davenport sofa or the Davenport desk, even though it was pretty clearly someone named, well, Davenport. There are some ideas around, but no thorough documentation.
I recently learned that Murphy is the number one surname in Ireland. The odds of tracking this one down seemed a lot smaller.
Not so.
The Murphys are alive and well and living in California. Well, some of them, anyway. They even have a website. (Yeah, go ahead on over--you'll get a quick demonstration.) I'm pretty much poaching directly from their story, but it turns out that one William L. Murphy who was born in Columbia, California, a Gold Rush boom town, made his way to San Francisco at around the turn of the last century. Like San Francisco dwellers even now, he found living quarters cramped and pricey, but being an enterprising type he invented a bed you could fold up into the wall, which at that time and for a long time to come was called the Murphy In-a-Dor Bed. Manufacturing began in San Francisco, but moved eventually to New York. (Although one of my sisters lived in a San Francisco studio for awhile and it had a genuine Murphy bed in it, which I have to say, was pretty neat.)
Another interesting thing about the bed was that it was in high demand in the 1920s and 30s, as urban dwellers faced the same dilemmas they do today. But with the onset of World War II, production dropped off because of the rationing of the steel used to build the bed frames. And after the war, the G.I. bill gave vets the possibility of buying their own homes and finding larger spaces.
Over the decades, this trend reversed, and if you live anywhere where housing is at a premium, as I do, you will be thinking that the Murphy bed seems like a pretty sweet deal.
Thank you, William Lawrence Murphy.
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Well that was mission accomplished. Murphy is a slightly comic surname in Ireland although I've never quite understood why.
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for the plug for Cold Cold Ground. I need the oxygen of publicity at the moment, not the carbon monoxide of, er, whatever the opposite of publicity is. It cant be bad publicity can it, because they say that all publicity is good publicity dont they?
Oh, Murphy's beds! James and I had a murphy's bed in our studio in portland. It was hardily built...maybe even too much so. The springs were so strong that we had to remove them so we wouldn't get sandwiched to the wall in our sleep!
ReplyDeleteAdrian, discovering why Murphy is a comical name in Ireland is beyond my abilities, but I believe that has carried across the sheugh as well.
ReplyDeleteI'm happy to publicize the book to whatever degree I can. On the Rachel Maddow show, they always refer to a frequent guest as "Pulitzer Prize winning jounalist and columnist for the Washington Post Eugene Robinson". We need some similar sort of epithet for you that we can plug in to the random sentence.
Brittany, I wonder if that ever happened to people with these beds--and what happened next!
ReplyDeleteJesus, Adrian, was Murphy a comic surname in the time of the Shankhill Butchers?
ReplyDeleteSeana, one of the 1950s American crime novels I've recently read, maybe Lester Dent's Honey in His Mouth, mentions a wall bed. I wondered when I read the passage in question why the author didn't just write "Murphy bed."
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Right and he could have, as the Murphy bed website says that they did not own the trademark on the name.
ReplyDeleteMy post may be inaccurate, as though there are definitely Murphys in California, I think these Murphys may have all taken off for New York.
These days they aren't usually wall beds. They are separate units of furniture.
Santa Cruz is underexploited territory, frankly.
Even if they had owned the trademark, nothing would have prevented an author from using the name. I like to think that he'd have used the generic term to avoid giving a manufacturer free publicity.
ReplyDeleteThough I've never slept in either, I've always liked both Murphy beds and trundle beds.
Good point. I wonder if it was more thought of as a Murphy bed in certain parts of the country and took on more generic labels elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteI don't know; finding out such things is your job.
ReplyDeleteLike many people, I have fond memories of beds in cartoons slamming back into the wall with the sleepers still in them. And crime novels naturally offered the grim possibility of a Murphy bed coming down from the wall with a dead body tucked inside.
Peter, if it was my job, I'd be paid better for it. Which is to say, at all.
ReplyDeleteRight, there is a kind of cartoon aspect to the Murphy bed's possibilities.
The Murphy bed in cartoons!!!
ReplyDelete================================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
The Honeymoon Hotel was particularly charming.
ReplyDeleteAnyone wanting to watch Shuteye Popeye won't get it from that link, but just plug the title into YouTube and you'll find it.
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