Journal

In earlier blogs I’ve written a little about my dad’s elder sisters, May and Beattie. Another fragment I remembered about them was that my mum and dad told me that when the sisters were adults and living in Southampton during the blitz, they couldn’t bear to go to the air raid shelters. Instead, they used to set out after work on their bikes and ride into the countryside to avoid the bombing. They slept wherever they could- often in the open air —and returned to the city the next day. What I hadn’t realised until recently was that escaping from cities during the blitz was a widespread phenomenon and was known as ‘trekking’. In 1940 and 1941, as the Luftwaffe focused on major cities outside London, tens of thousands of civilians like my aunts, spent their nights away from home in cars, buses, barns, churches, village halls, pubs and in the open air. It’s reported, for example, that in 1941, a third of the population of Hull were trying to keep safe by trekking out of harm’s way each evening. There was some official disapproval of this form of mass evacuation on the grounds that it might give the enemy the idea that civilian morale was low. And as you might imagine, this daily, large scale migration was also welcomed with varying degrees of enthusiasm by people living on the outskirts of cities and and in rural villages. Last year, my neighbour Sheila asked her mum, Jean, if she knew anything about trekking in Coventry and it turned out that she’d been a trekker herself. During the blitz, Jean then aged fifteen, was working at the SS factory (later re-named Jaguar Cars) near her home in the Holbrooks area of the city. The factory had been turned from car production to war work. Every evening after work, Jean and her parents got a lift out to Corley just outside Coventry, from a man they knew who had a truck. Once there, they slept in a barn. Like many other trekkers, Jean and her parents managed a very dangerous situation basically by turning themselves into commuters. Once they’d found a safer place to stay each night and the means to get there, they established a routine which allowed them to sleep in peace, to get to work each day and to check on the safety of their house and its contents. I found some interesting sources on all of this which are easily accessible online. For example, in the 1990s, Brad Beaven and John Griffiths published quite a lot about civilian life in working class communities during the Blitz, often drawing on the mass observation studies. Robert MacKay’s Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain During the Second World War, (2002) also refers to trekking and there’s a vivid account of it at https://ww2today.com/4th-december-1940-trekkink-out-of-town-to-avoid-air-raids So, I decided to make a piece of work called ‘Trekking’. When I was collaging the fabric and stitching it, I was thinking about Jean, Beattie and May and the thousands of others who upped sticks every night and trekked to safety.

I was really pleased to have two pieces selected for the Rugby Open 2020: The Workhouse Test and When the Rain Stops (1). And then, even more delighted when The Workhouse Test was given the judges' Highly Commended award. The exhibition was hung in December and everyone kept their fingers crossed that Covid restrictions would allow public access at some point. Sadly, not to be but hats off to the Rugby Art Gallery and Museum staff for working their socks off and doing such a good job with the online catalogue and virtual exhibition. http://www.rugby.gov.uk/ragm/homepage/169/rugby_open_2020

A while back, Louis then eight, asked me what was my favourite smell. I said that I liked the smell you get when the rain stops. I told him I didn't mind where - in the city or the country. It’s good straight away and then as the air and the ground warm up a bit, it gradually changes. I asked him the same question in return and he told me that he thought the smell of dog food was ‘kind of interesting’ but his out-and-out favourite was frying bacon. His elder brother, Micah, said ‘spices’ without hesitation. As luck would have it a few days after the conversation, I read an article in one of the Sundays about ‘petrichor’ which is apparently the name given to the smells you get after rain. That article along with the good feeling I got talking to Louis and Micah, set me thinking about wet city and country walks I’d been on and the point when the rain had cleared. I began to do some drawings and samples of work which for the time being, I organised under the heading ‘petrichor’. I’ve just finished the first textile piece in the series and I’ve called it ‘When the Rain Stops (1)’.

When I started doing this journal/blog a few months back, one of my friends wrote me an email saying,' Remember you're only as good as your last blog!' No pressure, then. He wrote again yesterday asking me why I hadn't posted anything for so long - and of course, he knows the answer to that. Since my last post, the Coronavirus pandemic has really taken off, though anyone who's watching even a small amount of news knows that in the UK, we've seen nothing yet. Despite the lockdown, for most of us, it's still a bit like the 'phoney war' stage. So, like everyone else, my mind's been on that most of the time. I haven't really thought about writing about textile art, and all exhibition planning is obviously on hold. I have no mentoring group meetings to keep me on the straight and narrow but I'm working steadily on a newish, quite large piece. Frankly, all this seems a bit small beans compared with the things that many people are facing. One bit of textile art news, however, is that I had one of the pieces from my China Nights series (above) accepted for the Coventry Open at the Herbert Art Gallery. Really pleased. I did these pieces from the sketchbook I'd put together when I was in China about four years ago. I hadn't been very happy with the sketchbook and had left it gathering dust on a shelf for quite a while. Several of the sketches and collages were based on the night view from my hotel window in Shanghai and these were the ones I used some time later, to do three textile pieces. The best bit for me was that when I went to the gallery the day after the opening, a small group of young Chinese women were standing around my piece, talking about it , looking carefully and taking photographs on their phones. Anyway, Covid 19 put paid to the exhibition before the end of its run but there's now a virtual version and here's the link https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/the-herbert-museum-and-art-gallery Delighted to get a red dot on my piece. It's always nice when someone likes your work enough to want to take it home.

In the previous post about hand-stitching, I wrote about being in Brussels in 2011 while we were waiting for one of my grandsons to be born. I arrived early and he arrived late! Just thought I'd post a detail of the piece I did while I sat by the fire with my daughter, waited at the ante-natal clinic, watched children's telly in French with my other grandson, chewed my fingernails when my daughter was in labour and so on....

I was given a copy of Claire Wellesley Smith’s Slow Stitch for Christmas and I’ve really been enjoying reading it. She writes very convincingly about community engagement and locally-based and sustainable ways of approaching textile art. She describes features of her family background and connectedness to stitch that are resoundingly familiar to me. Questioning whether fast always equals best, she suggests applying the musical term tiempo giusto (the right speed) to the way we approach textile art and life in general- I’m not always so good at that!. The book has lots of lovely photographs of her own and other people’s hand- stitched textiles, often using re-purposed and found materials. I met my friend Marg (hand stitcher) for a cuppa yesterday and took the book to show her. She buried her face in it for ten minutes and then beetled over to Waterstones to order a copy. Marg’s work’s smashing but she’d been giving herself a bit of a hard time for doing exclusively small, slowly-stitched pieces. Not any more! Reading the book, I was reminded of the many times that Jean Draper has talked to me about the personal and creative significance of the process and rhythm of hand-stitching- what she gets from that very singular process and what it contributes to the work she’s making. It's something very different from and far beyond the slightly sterile notion of ‘technique’. It was Jean who introduced me to Kantha, Japanese Boro and Banjara. I remember showing her a piece of old Banjara work that I’d bought. She peered at it and said, ‘Oh look- I think she was left handed.’ Claire Wellesley Smith’s book also reminded me that I’ve been doing less hand-stitching of late and that I’m missing some of the things that she and Jean describe so well. All my work has some hand-stitching in it but not as much as I was doing about five years ago. This is partly because the type of work I was doing then was very tough on my hands and I had to back off a bit to give my arthritic joints a sporting chance. A number of the pieces I did at that time were to mark significant events and the quiet thinking that I did while I was stitching was very important to me both in its own right and in the way it affected the process and finished work. Two examples were Waiting for Louis (2011) and Landscape for a Sparrowhawk (2013). I stitched Waiting for Louis when I was in Brussels waiting for my grandson to be born. I’d gone there to be with my daughter and I’d arrived very early in case Louis surprised us. In fact, he came late and so there was plenty of time to stitch the piece. I began Landscape for a Sparrowhawk (above) on the train on my way to the funeral of my friend Sara’s son, LB. I wrote about him in an earlier blog. The piece I started on the train was a gift for his mum and stitching it gave me the time and space to think about one of the saddest events imaginable. So, maybe time to do a bit more hand-stitching. Perhaps if I use a hoop and think about tiempo giusto, my finger joints'll be OK.

The nineteenth century Poor Law reforms were driven, among other things, by the conviction that the cost of poor relief which was the responsibility of local parishes, was getting out of hand. It was argued that it was far too easy to get relief and that many found it more attractive to live off hand-outs than to earn an honest living by the sweat of their brow. Does this sound resoundingly familiar? A ‘ lifestyle choice', maybe? Anyway, idleness needed to be deterred. The reforms in 1834 centralised the whole system, introduced a lot of new rules and dusted off and re-branded some old ones. The Workhouse had a key part to play in the reforms and there was an extensive and costly workhouse building programme to meet the new requirements. Conditions in these places were to be deliberately harsh - ‘less eligible’ (ie worse!) that those endured by the working poor outside. If you were an able bodied person asking the authorities for relief from poverty, the only thing you were to be offered was admission to The Workhouse. And that was the Workhouse Test- the idea that if you were truly desperate and really had nothing, you’d take The Workhouse and all that went with it. Of course, the new national system didn’t work like a well-oiled machine and there were deviations from the principles as well as many local variations in practice. The Workhouse, though, has endured as the most potent symbol of the things that were feared about the Poor Law.

I wrote in an earlier blog about the way that workhouse uniforms were used as a means of control. Clothing was also used to distinguish between different categories of workhouse inmates. It wouldn't do to confuse the deserving and the undeserving, after all. The title of this piece is taken from an 1839 minute of the Poor Law Commissioners which discusses the way that some workhouses compelled single women who had a child or who were pregnant to wear dress of a particular colour as a mark of disgrace. While the Commissioners said that they appreciated that the Boards of Guardians wished to suppress vice (a laudable aim), even they were uneasy about this particular uniform. Peter Higginbotham, an authority on the Poor Law, has written about the practice in the Bristol workhouses of the 1830s, of making women wear yellow if they were deemed to be prostitutes and red if they were single mothers. Well, well - that’ll sure teach ‘em!

The second piece in the Workhouse Series is really about a whole mixture of things I was thinking about: resistance, humanity and ingenuity in the face of forces that are set to control, destroy and dehumanise. Recently, I read The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver and one of the characters says this: ‘In the scullery kitchens and probably the salt mines of this world, many a child is not so much raised as hammered into shape. To be of use. Surviving by the grace of utility alone.’ I said in the first blog about the Workhouse Series that my father spent the majority of his childhood in institutions run by Poor Law Guardians, including an adult workhouse , before being shipped off to work first on a farm and then as a plasterer's apprentice 150 miles away. . There was undoubtedly a fair amount of being ’hammered into shape’ but I’ve always been interested (and grateful) that someone who by any standards, had a very harsh start in life, turned into a pretty decent and loving man. So, the question remains about how he was ‘raised’. We’ll never know for certain but I have an idea that his sisters had a hand in it. As an adult, my father spoke about how they had done their best to look after him during the time that he was in the institutions. This must have taken some effort as we know that the Poor Law authorities didn’t pay too much heed to the idea of keeping paupers’ families together and in some ways, actively worked against it. In some workhouses, though, infants were allowed to stay in the women’s wing of the building and so it may be that other women showed him kindness, too. We also know that when he was in his teens and living 150 miles from his sisters, he met another young man, Bill, at bible class. Bill’s family who had very little to spare, nevertheless took my dad into their home. When he was in his 80s, Bill (who became my godfather) told me with some distress of the conditions my father was living in when they met: he described it as ‘slavery’. I’ve always found it very moving (and truly amazing) that in some of the most dire circumstances, people do not always become dehumanised. Many persist in asserting their humanity and that of others, often in small and characteristic ways. They find some means to resist the worst impacts of what is being done to them and to others. They find the elbow room to win a little ground and act on their worlds rather than simply being acted upon. Even though they themselves have little, many manage to give something immeasurably valuable to those who have less. While the Poor Law Commissioners left it to the discretion of the local Boards of Guardians to decide on the clothing to be worn by workhouse inmates, in practice most adopted a standard uniform. This could identify people as a particular category of pauper, act as a mechanism of control and was also workwear for those times when they were required to do physical labour. Photographs of people in workhouse clothing often look really bleak and regimented and it can be hard not to see them just as an undifferentiated mass of figures on the page. So, I decided to use the workhouse uniform as my starting point for a piece of work that reflected some of my thinking about the ways people were controlled and 'hammered into shape' and the efforts they made to resist this. It's called Sisters and Others and is made from collaged cloth and thread. I've used both hand and machine stitching.