Chuckmuck
A chuckmuck is a belt-hung leather and metal decorated tinder pouch with an attached thin long striking plate, found across North Asia and China to Japan from at least the 17th century.
This large distinctive style of a worldwide daily utensil was noted in Victorian British India and the 1880s Anglo-Indian word chuckmuck (derived from chakmak) was adopted into specialist English by the early 20th century.
On the top fold a thin metal plate with 1 - 3 small hooks allow the pouch to be hung from the belt with a chuckmuck strap: a chain, leather thong or embroidered cloth.
The decorated stiff leather purse of the chuckmuck with its attached curved striker make it a design classic among flint and steel kits.
The 19th-century growth in museums and world expositions in several countries led to many exhibits on the theme of man making fire and several of these included examples of chuckmucks.
Since this coincided with the introduction of the friction match, the function of the tinderbox and tinder pouch gradually became unnecessary, and by the end of the 19th century, only its use as ethnic jewellery by Mongolians and Tibetans kept the chuckmuck in daily use.
[25] A camping book in 1871 details "a very convenient and portable means of carrying fire, sold under the name of "strike-a-light" or "chuckmuck"; it is formed of a brass tube of 1in.
in length, which has a cap and a sliding bottom to it : it is filled of tinder….it contains also a gun flint or bit of agate, and its chain passes through an oval of steel or case-hardened iron” costing around a shilling [26] - clearly one of the plethora of short-lived metal tinderbox designs.
However, after the 1889 publication of Hindu-koh[27] by Donald Macintyre (VC), a prominent British Gurkha officer, containing the first known illustration and description of a chuckmuck, the word became more strictly defined in academic circles.
“In Ladakh both men and women wore in their waste-clothes or girdles a chakmak (or leather case ornamented with brass, containing a flint, steel and tinder)”.
[36] William Moorcroft, extensively catalogued the Himalayan regions around Ladakh in the 1820s, noting “Every man carries a knife hanging from his girdle, and a chakmak,or steel for striking a light”.
[37] In 1891 William Woodville Rockhill recorded some of Salar language, an archaic Turkic dialect spoken near Lanzhou between the Tibetan plateau and Mongolia.
