Study Day

Consistent Knitter, Karen, suggested we travel to the Knitting in Wartime Study Day in the Lighthouse, Glasgow, of which modern history Professor Lynn Abrams and colleagues at the University of Glasgow were organisers .  Karen just completed this Kate Davies cardigan which she wore with justifiable pride.  From podium to participant, delegates greeted her and her cardigan like long lost friends and hastened to discuss their own trip through that pattern.... 

A business conference was taking place upstairs, but it wasn't hard to work out which floor we were going to 

It was a fascinating day and opened up a world to me of which I'd been wholly unaware.  And in fact, Dr. Jane Tynan spoke about her own surprise at stumbling upon the knitting frenzy generated by the outbreak of World War One -  she had set out to study the history of khaki and become happily side tracked into knitting. Knitting, she found, was a practical, positive and occasionally eccentric direct intervention in the war effort from those left at home.  It was an important expression of love and moral support from mostly women. However she posited that the cooperation and congregation of individual knitters and knitting groups might have planted some unforeseen seeds of subversion in terms of expansion of women's rights down the line, and she observed that this might also have been a very natural through-flow from the suffragette movement.  

From Joyce Meader's collection

Wendy Turner explained the purpose of the Glasgow Women's Library and spoke about their policy of offering an open door and informal environment in which (amongst many other social groupings) matters to do with knitting and knitters should feel very much at home.  She spoke of the importance of social history, and developing an awareness of careful preservation of even current social perspectives for the sake of accurate future overview. She also told of the potential available for study in the as yet uncatalogued Knitting Pattern Collection, which comprises over 400 exhibits.  She offered access to this to anyone interested in research, and indeed she had brought some along for us to see.

from Joyce Meader's collection

Mittens with shooting finger - Joyce Meader's collection.

Joyce Meader arrived with her amazing collection of knitting, mending, reading and just about all-to-do-with-the-domestic-war-effort paraphernalia - a sub culture with further sub cultures about which up to yesterday I had never even dreamed.  She had  bell gauges, darning mushrooms which doubled as torches (for continuing working in a bomb shelter)... She even had a contact for someone who'll rent out a full size war trench he's dug in his back garden...  She passed around original knitted comforts (sic) and her own extensive reproductions from contemporaneous patterns covering a time span from Crimea to modern day.  Her exhibits were amusing, horrifying and heart rending in equal measure, and exposed the practical and vulnerable aspects of kitting out a soldier.   She spoke about the evolution of war knitting and military kit, and also of her work with historic war re-enactors and war movies - she expressed the view (as, indeed, did Dr. Jane Tynan), that war re-enactors have an unparalleled thirst for precision and obsession with their chosen subjects and are the best source to approach on clarifying detail. 

From Joyce Meader's collection - knit from American civil war pattern -  flags underfoot could be alternated depending on which side you were on

Knit to original pattern in cotton - WW1 medical bandage - from Joyce Meader's collection

sock measure from Joyce Meader's collection

Professor Maggie Andrews spoke about the cultural history of domesticity throughout WW1 and the importance of its expression through knitting. She  told of the very urgent practical need at the outbreak of war in Britain to clothe an abrupt and vast expansion of troop numbers, and of shifting attitudes of  authority towards war knitting  between 1914 and 1918. Women's fervour to knit came as an initial surprise, but reaction moved from bemused and condescending (attracting even parliamentary mention), to real recognition of a vital war resource available in knitting.  Professor Andrews then told of a class-based, wifely reigning in and directing of knitting.  The Queen and other well-to-do, socially prominent wives made appeals for knitters to concentrate efforts on specific items in short supply at different times, and often with such an appeal would come an accompanying pattern and directions about colour.   Equipment such as the sock measure (pictured above) began to be devised because differing results emanating from differing knitters were not seen as conducive to necessary military uniformity.  

As war progressed, materials had also become scarcer and good management of available yarns was another reason to marshall the knitters. Although individuals still knit for individual soldiers on a voluntary basis,  the emphasis was now on on-going replenishment of knitting produce being sufficiently important to warrant even greater organisation.  A requirement was also identified to employ women made needy by war, and this saw unemployed women (in addition to a few entrepreneurs,  notably one London based woman with machines) deployed to provide knitting on a commercial basis for mutual benefit of themselves and the army.  Craft now had begun to reap real commercial rewards, and public pride and recognition began to attach to knitting and other craft forms - Exhibitions were arranged for patriotic display of talent: exhibitions led to sales, sales led to greater financial freedom and put women on an independent commercial footing.  The new demand for knitwear is also seen as likely to have fed a later demand for knitwear as high fashion in the 1920's...

From Joyce Meader's collection

Last, but not least,  Barbara Smith of the Knitting and Crochet Guild, spoke about the development of specific organisations around knitting and crochet,  such as the Women's Institute, and the part they played in supporting and documenting the evolution of craft in war time. She took us through popular war-time knitting patterns and specific (and occasionally startling!) trends in design and subject matter, and the place of the Knitting and Crochet Guild in the cataloguing of these.   I would very much have liked to have got a photo of one of the moving Welcome Home crochet table cloths she had brought from her display, but unfortunately at that point we had to rush back home.

Thank you to everyone involved in this tremendously interesting day!  In my opinion, investigating and recording this area is not only a proper compliment to the value of the contribution of knitters, but the possibilities of learning from this ever broadening bank of experience are, literally, positively endless too.