In praise of stretchers

I've always liked stretcher beds.   As a young child, I remember finding the camp beds comfortable during the Christmas Holiday trip to Maroochydore.  I don't remember anything in particular about their design, but I'm pretty sure they were canvas stretchers or bunks of some design.

As a teenager, when in cadets, we used to sometimes sleep on old military canvas stretchers of this type of design:

except the canvas was white and very thick, and and the steel rods and leg brackets were pretty heavy and the whole thing probably weighed three times as much as the modern version shown here.

Still, I always found them comfortable too.

And so we advance to today, where recent experience both at home and camping has made me turn against inflatable bedding and try the modern version of this (presumably) old design:

In fact, this was the very model bought this weekend, when an air mattress failed us on the first night.  (Air mattresses are not to be trusted.  Sure they can be bought very cheaply  now in nice, thick versions, but there's nothing worse than a slowly deflating mattress to disturb a night's rest.)

Stretchers like this are, in contrast, very sturdy and comfortable, and fold up quickly.  This one is pretty heavy, but it's not as if you're ever going to try to carry one far.

Of course, they don't use canvas for them any more, so you don't get the added pleasure of the smell, but you can't have everything.  (Everyone likes the smell of canvas, don't they?  Or is it just that it was imprinted on me as a child during pleasurable beach side camping?)

Googling around tonight to see if my fondness for stretchers was shared, I tried to look up the history of this design.  Certainly, nothing turns up of great use in the first pages of results. I assume the cross leg design must be pretty old, and maybe its inventor is lost to us.

It's hard to find anything about their use, let alone the designer.  I did find this, though, from the Australian War Memorial:

It's a stretcher as used by a Captain JM Head in New Guinea in the Second World War.  It's pretty basic, and one would assume it may well be the same used in World War 1, or the US Civil War.  But it's hard turning up information on this topic quickly.

The problem is, of course, that whenever you search for "stretcher" something, you get links to medical stretcher information and images.  And, gosh, don't people find that subject fascinating.   Look, here's a 29 page "Short History of [Mountain] Stretchers" alone.

Anyhow, I'm all impressed anew with the comfort and portability of stretchers.  I'm not entirely sure why mattresses ever caught on.