Learning Bedfordshire Lace

Last year, following the success of the Lace in Place project through BCA Gallery there was a resurgence in interest from local people to learn the skill of lacemaking.

Marilyn Two and Sandra King of the Aragon lacemakers were keen to encourage and teach people, in order to keep the craft going and create another generation of lacemakers.

I was perhaps approaching lacemaking from a different perspective, having documented a huge number of bobbins and added many thousands of lace patterns and pieces to the Museums database. Not really fully understanding what it was all about, I was inspired by the beauty of the Thomas Lester collection lace and fascinated to give it a go in my spare time. The Lace in Place project gave me the opportunity to get to know the Aragon lacemakers better and going forward the opportunity to learn Bedfordshire lace from our local experts in the field.

Lace in Place on display in St. Paul's Square until end of February 2013

  

I had only really started on the basics of ‘whole’ cloth stitch and ‘half stitch’ when a new project was afoot with the making of a lace commission for The Higgins new displays.

I suddenly found myself in at the deep end. I was quite familiar with the different bits of kit needed for lacemaking having seen much of it on display at the museum and in the store. The lace pillow used today is polysterene rather than the traditional straw filled round kind, although the bobbins are pretty much the same.

Example lace pillow from The Higgins Collections

There is a variety of bobbins in use today, the bone ones are less common, the wooden bobbins are popular being heavier and nicer to work. Then there are the plastic bobbins, which do the job but are very light, and as I found a bit slippery – they kept unwinding themselves, which was frustrating. The bobbins cotton thread stays in place by putting a ‘hitch’ (a type of slip knot) around the top of the bobbin, which experienced lacemakers make look sooooo easy, but when you are learning it is and essential skill that is really quite hard to get right – especially when you have eight or twelve bobbins to contend with.

Showing 'hitch' around the top of the bobbin

The heart design I had started with, with just four bobbins had seemed quite straight forward and only needed one stitch repeated. Bobbins are always worked in pairs, they are wound in pairs before starting work with pure cotton thread. The design for the pattern is taken from a printed pattern, cut out and backed with card at the same size.

Traditional 'pricking' or lace pattern, patterns were drawn by hand or traced onto vellum and later card. Today photocopied designs are cut out from paper and  backed to card using sticky-back plastic, but play the same function as earlier patterns. Holes are pricked into the material using a 'pricker'.

To seal the card and paper pattern together blue sticky back plastic is used (a modern addition) – which brought back memories from my youth of covering exercise books for school. You then use a tool called a ‘pricker’ (a sharp pointed skewer) to prick holes into the pattern – hence why the pattern is sometimes also called a pricking. The holes pricked into the pattern are for the pins to be placed in as you work along the rows with your bobbins making the stitch.

Picture of piece created for Aragon lacemakers community contribution to the new Higgins displays

The community project piece was more challenging needing the skills of both whole stitch and half stitch, learning what a ‘footside’ was in the lace and how to create this effect. The interior design was also challenging learning how to make ‘legs’ using half stitch, and to attach more bobbins for the central design by using a pin lifter to remove a pin, and then thread through the bobbins. I also learnt how to secure the legs together by criss-crossing the bobbins in a ‘Windmill’ Stitch. The ‘leaves’ or ‘petals’ were more difficult to master, as they require a weaving finesse of four bobbins one over the other – over under over under over, then moving the two outside bobbins out and then back in to make the leaf shape. It was very satisfying to get to the end of my first leaf, having undone and redone the leaf several times before mastering a shape that I was happy with. The next thing was to make four all look the same …quite tricky for a beginner I can tell you.

Annotated picture with stitches and parts demonstrated

I was very pleased once I got to the end of my piece for the community project – it took me around 18 hours, but was well worth it for the end result. 

I do now feel ready for my next challenge in Bedfordshire lace and can’t tell you what a privilege it is to have experienced lacemakers taking the time to teach us learners the basics of the craft. The hours of work in the preparation of the project, the support given to the Aragon lacemakers members to get involved and the development of people’s skills in Bedfordshire lace is to be applauded.

I would like to say a personal thankyou to Marilyn, Sandra and Pam for all their time and kind words of encouragement. Do come to see the finished display piece when the Higgins re-opens, I promise it will be well worth a look.

Lydia Saul,
Keeper of Social History

A Face from the Past - Tiles from Warden Abbey

This almost life size clay tile of a youngish, bearded man looking straight out at the world is rare survivor from the 14^th century.

John Sell Cotman, Door to the Abbots
Hall, Rievaulx Abbey, sepia wash
and black lead, 1803. Trustees of
the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery

The tile is part of a group of rare Picture tiles found at Warden Abbey.  The Abbey was founded in 1135 as a daughter house of Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire. Over time the Cistercian order at Warden became very wealthy and the buildings were extended and lavishly decorated, this is certainly seen by the two exceptionally high quality tiled pavements, one in the church and the other in the Abbots lodgings.

In 1537 the abbey was dissolved, the abbey buildings were destroyed the materials sold off and the land passed into the hands of the Gostwick family who built a new mansion on the site. Though much of this early brick built mansion was destroyed in 1790 the north east wing is still standing.

Luckily most of the tiled pavements were not removed during the dissolution and remained fairly intact under the soil. The tiles were excavated in 1974 and are on loan to The Higgins from Mr Samuel Whitbread and the Southill Estate. This and several other tiles will be featured in our new displays from Spring 2013.

The remains of the Abbey in early 20th century in a 'ruinous state'. Today it is in far
better condition, restored in 1974 by the Landmark Trust.

Great Bedfordians: Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington by David Litchfield 2012

Unrequited love and Dora Carrington unfortunately go hand in hand, and no I'm not talking about her relationship with the homosexual writer Lytton Stratchey, but about her relationship with Bedford and in particular me. 

I love Dora Carrington. There, I've said it. It's been like this for years. We went to the same school you see, spent time in the same art room, walked along the same corridors, admittedly at slightly different times, me in 1993 her in the 1903. But whilst I remained happily in Bedford she couldn't wait to get away.

The Carrington family moved to Bedford, like many others, for the good but inexpensive schools. Originally living on De Parys they moved to Rothsay Gardens and remained there until all five of the Carrington children were educated. Art was always appreciated in their house, Dora's mother would bring home illustrated catalogues from the Royal Academy and there were reproductions of Millais, Velazquez and Alma Tadema hanging on the walls. At school Dora excelled at drawing and when she was 17 her teachers recommended that as there was no art school in Bedford for her to continue her training she should apply to the Slade School of Art in London.

Entering the Slade in 1910 was the beginning of Carrington's life, on outward appearance the dutiful daughter of Victorians, inwardly was a different story. She had found living in Bedford repressive and unbearable and within her first year at the school she started to rebel against her upbringing. She cut her hair into a short crop and began to make her own clothes in the style of the artist Augustus Johns muse Dorelia. She also dropped her Christian name, saying she found it vulgar and sentimental. Forever more she would be known simply as Carrington.

This new Carrington did not fit in on her rare trips back to Bedford, having explained her cropped hair to her parents as being necessary for a fancy dress party she wrote of attending a dance 'where the village boys had quite forgotten me, and taken unto them new lasses. They gaze askance at my shorn locks - little did they realise who it was in their midst! No, sad it is to relate but I was not appreciated'.

Her fellow students at the Slade were to become some of the brightest stars of the British art world; Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, CRW Nevinson and Mark Gertler were all amongst her friends. But whilst they went on to have glittering careers, hers stalled after she graduated, and for a time she was known more for her associations with the group of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury group, than for her work.

This was due to a number of reasons. The year Carrington entered the Slade was a year of great change in British art. The first Post-Impressionist exhibition was held in London, introducing the work of Van Gogh, Cezanne and Picasso to England for the first time. This new art was against everything that traditional art schools like the Slade believed in. Artists like Carrington whose talent for drawing perfectly suited the Slade’s ideal of what an artist should be, found themselves torn between the new style of art and what their tutors where asking of them. For Carrington this confusion in her talent was further entrenched when she approached the art critic Roger Fry, who had organised the Post Impressionism exhibition for advice about her work, and he discouraged her from a career as a serious artist.

This and a lack of confidence in her own work led her to being described ‘as the most neglected serious painter of her generation’.

These days her work is exhibited in all the major galleries, there has been a film of her life starring Emma Thompson, and sales of her work increase in value yearly. Nowhere is she more appreciated than in Bedford, the paintings The Higgins have in their collection are amongst the most requested and talks on her are always packed with people travelling long distances to hear about her work.

I like to think that although she left us as soon as she could, she would be pleased the town that where she was once not ‘appreciated’ now consider her as a Great Bedfordian.

Victoria Partridge

Keeper of Fine and Decorative Art

Thanks to: 

David Litchfield for his lovely illustration

Article reproduced from November issue of the Bedford Clanger newspaper

Barbara Hepworth - The Hospital Drawings

Barbara Hepworth, Quartet – Arthroplasty, 1948. Oil and pencil on board.

Quartet – Arthroplasty, detail

At the centre of the frenzied lines and smeared paint of Quartet – Arthroplasty, is a remarkable stillness and sense of calm. The drawing, by Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), shows a group of surgeons performing a complex operation to relieve the diseased joints of the arthritic patient, but there is no blood or gore to be seen. The focus is the beautifully drawn left hand of the surgeon in the centre. Where the scalpel connects with the patient the white of the ground shines brightly through with an almost religious glow - but here the miracle is science, the skill of the surgeons, and the calm coordination between. The last factor transfixed the artist and is emphasised by the title, which alludes to the harmonious and synchronised movements of the figures and intuitive understanding between them reminiscent of a musical quartet (though in fact there are six figures depicted). Barbara Hepworth later wrote of the experience of watching the surgery in her autobiography:

In 1947 it was suggested to me that I might be interested in watching an operation in a hospital. At first I was very scared but then I found there was such beauty in the coordinated human endeavour in the operating theatre that the whole composition-human in appearance-became abstract in shape. I became completely absorbed by two things: first the extraordinary beauty of purpose between human beings all dedicated to saving life; and secondly by the way this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture very close to what I had been seeking in my own work.

Barbara Hepworth photographed in the early 1970s

The piece has come out of The Higgins store and travelled to The Hepworth Wakefield to feature in a new exhibition which runs from 27^th October until 3^rd February. Hepworth – The Hospital Drawings is the largest gathering of these powerful studies and reveals a very different side to an artist best known for the organic forms and highly finished surfaces of her sculptures such as The Higgins own Four Figures Waiting of 1968.

Quartet isn’t the only work out and about, the Dulwich Picture Gallery are currently borrowing two of our works by John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) for their exhibition Cotman in Normandy which continues until 13^th January 2013.

Barbara Hepworth, Four Figures Waiting, 1968. Cast bronze.

Kristian Purcell 

Curatorial Assistant 

China in the East

An exhibition showcasing spectacular Chinese collections at Epping Forest District Museum 7th July – 25th September 2012

Chinese Shoes

China in the East is an exhibition that has drawn together Chinese collections from several local museums in the Eastern region, including several artefacts from The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford.
This exhibition is part of Eastern Exchanges, a major festival celebrating the culture and colour of the east to mark the London 2012 Games. Eastern Exchanges is an official part of London 2012 Cultural Olympiad programme Stories of the World which presents exciting new museum exhibitions across the UK, created by young people.

The exhibition tours the eastern region starting in Epping Forest District Museum and then going to Ipswich Town Hall, Hertford Museum and ending at Lowewood Museum in Hoddesdon

A bamboo hat

The artefacts that The Higgins has leant to the exhibition include a hair ornament, a bamboo hat, a pair of shoes and an opium pipe. We don’t know a huge amount about the objects, other then they are from China. The items originally formed part of the Bedford Modern School Museum which was founded in 1885. During the 1920’s and 1930’s the museum curator Rev P. G. Langdon was keen to promote both local archaeology and the collecting of objects from further a field. Many of the old boys were actively encouraged to bring back objects for the museum from their postings overseas to inspire the pupils to join the colonial service.

Beaded Hair Ornament

An Opium pipe

Volunteers have been instrumental in the long process of photographing and documenting many of these objects and they are also helping us to research their histories. We’ll hopefully have a guest post from one of our volunteers soon, detailing her findings. Watch this space...

Sunday Scholars at Bunyan Meeting

As with many exhibitions, the idea for ‘Sunday Scholars’ came from discovering a “forgotten” item in the store.  Last year I came across a handful of Sunday school stamp books. They had belonged to Lillian Whiting who had attended Bunyan Meeting Sunday School during the 1920s. The stamps were given out each week to the children to mark their attendance. At the end of the year (or sometimes the quarter) children would get prizes and rewards for good attendance.

Booklet of Sunday School Stamps previously owned by Lillian Whiting, 1920's © John Bunyan Museum

With my exhibition hat always on, I thought that Sunday schools would be an interesting theme, allowing the link with Bunyan Meeting church to be explored and possibly linking with the wider community.

What I didn’t realise at the time was how potentially large a subject the history of Sundays schools was, and the many directions which could be followed. I had to remember that I have only a fairly small exhibition space and I had to keep a tight focus. I felt that the most interesting aspect to explore in the exhibition was the vital role that Sunday Schools played in helping the poor working majority of people in this country to learn to read. This is a story of national importance, now largely forgotten, which, I discovered also has strong local connections.

For instance the local lace-making schools, set up to teach reading and lace-making, relied heavily on the Sunday schools to teach reading and writing. Lydia at the Higgins who discovered this fact through her own research was able to loan us a bobbin used in lace making with ‘John Bunyan’ written on it.

Children making lace at Bletsoe, August 1914. BEDFM 2000.341 

Through research we found that Bunyan Meeting and its Sunday schools, also linked to The Higgins, as Bunyan Meeting used part of what is now the Bedford Gallery for its Sunday school between 1848 -1867.  That Bunyan Meeting’s large hall (now used for badminton club and Wednesday lunches) was made specially to house the huge number of children attending the Sunday school (approx. 400 children!).

Bunyan Meeting Sunday School, c.1910 © Brian Stevens

I also discovered a reference to the first school mistress at Bunyan Meeting Mary Woodward, that on her grave it reads - “This worthy woman founded Bunyan Sunday School. Robert Raikes was her guest”. Robert Raikes was the founder of the Sunday school movement. After a bit of searching in the flower beds in the church garden, I found the grave now tucked behind a tree and only just legible.

Grave of Mary Woodward, first school mistress, died August 9 1820, age 75, © John Bunyan Museum

As well as the help given by The Higgins, I also borrowed objects from the British Schools Museum, Hitchin and Warwickshire Museum Service, and used pictures from Bedfordshire and Luton Archives Service. Lots of items, including more stamp books and prizes came from members of the Bunyan Meeting. I felt it would be a good opportunity to collect some of the local memories of Sunday Schools, which can be read in the exhibition. Here's one contribution:

"My grandparents were caretakers at a large Victorian Baptist church in Yorkshire. During the war when my father was away weekends would be spent at my grandparents, so from the age of three Sunday School was a part of my life. I can remember a table sand tray and singing, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam and hear the pennies dropping. Later anniversaries in new  frock and outing by train to Southport."

If you have any memories of Sunday Schools, it would be great to hear them and share them too!

You can see John Bunyan's Bobbin, a school slate, Robert Raikes commemorative Sunday Schools medal and a tea ticket from a Sunday School Meeting at Elstow, all from The Higgins collection, on display as part of the Sunday Scholars exhibition at John Bunyan Museum.
The exhibition is open until the 15^th September 2012, during the normal museum opening times – Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 4pm. There are lots of family friendly activities, including the chance to draw your own animal to join our ‘Noah’s Ark’, and every Friday in August we have a fun programme of children’s craft activities. www.bunyanmeeting.co.uk/museum . 


By Nicola Sherhod, Curator of John Bunyan Museum

The Case of the American Bittern

American Bittern - a very rare accidental visitor

I first came across the American Bittern specimen whilst auditing the natural history collection at the art gallery and museum in October 2010, prior to it being packed up for storage. Subsequently, I have been given the chance to plan displays for two cases in the new Collectors Gallery when the art gallery and museum re-open in 2013. I knew I would like to display the American Bittern and wanted to learn more about it.

This American Bittern is the only example that has ever been seen in Bedfordshire and it exists as a cased taxidermied specimen in the natural history collection. It formed part of a collection of birds, eggs, and nests donated by Jannion Steele Elliott (1871-1942). How he acquired it is unknown but he refers to it in his book, 'The vertebrate fauna of Bedfordshire' ,under:

American Bittern Botaurus lentiginosus

“An example of this rare straggler from a far-off continent was shot by Mr Cocking, from the brook by the old race-course at Elstow 13th November, 1886, and in whose possession it still remains. Mr Covington in whose hands I saw the bird whilst being set up informs me that it was a female, and in very good condition, the stomach contained at the time the remains of three small dace and a water shrew.”

This is confirmed by an inscription on the back of the case:

Inscription reads ‘American Bittern shot on Elstow Brook Nov 13/86 by Mr J Cocking’ 

label inside case

  

The ‘Mr Covington’ referred to is Arthur Silas Covington (1847-1915), who was a taxidermist operating a business in Bedford. He was born and died in Bedford and during his lifetime had workshops in St Paul’s Square, Lurke Street, and Foster Hill Road. His occupation on the 1871 census for St Paul’s Square is actually given as ‘Birdstuffer’! In later census’ he is listed as a taxidermist and naturalist but also as a hairdresser. 

Getting back to the American Bittern, the species was first described in 1813 by Colonel George Montagu (1753-1815) from the first British record. Montagu was regarded as one of Britain’s great naturalists and a number of species are named after him.The Bittern was collected near the River Frome, Puddletown in Dorset in the autumn of 1804. It was shot by Mr Cunningham who sent the corpse to Colonel George of Penryn, Cornwall. Described initially as a Great Bittern (Botarus stellaris) it was then mounted as a Little Bittern (Ixobrychus minutus). The specimen was later purchased as a Little Bittern by Montagu who was apparently quite taken aback when it arrived as it was not what he expected and he subsequently described it as a new species, naming it Freckled Heron.

Currently the American Bittern breeds across much of North America and winters in the southern United States, Central America and the West Indies. It is a rare migrant to the British Isles and according to Philip Palmer in his book First for Britain and Ireland “American Bittern was presumed to reach Europe by resting on the surface of the sea using outstretched wings!” There have been about 65 American Bitterns recorded in Britain, with the majority occurring prior to 1960. The most recent was recorded at Walmsley Sanctuary, near Wadebridge, Cornwall in 2010. It is a wetland specialist but numbers have seriously declined since the 1960s due to habitat loss and degradation of sites particularly in the United States, which would explain perhaps why very few have turned up in Britain in recent decades. The species is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List as a species of Least Concern.

The American Bittern male has a very unusual call, which I have been privileged to hear in the wild, and this call has given rise to various local names including ‘Bogbumper’, ‘Thunder Pump’, and ‘Stake-driver’.

Click this link to listen and enjoy!

This YouTube link has some nice footage of an American Bittern and is informative too. 

Melissa Banthorpe
Volunteer at The Higgins, working with the Natural History collection.  

References

The Vertebrate Fauna of Bedfordshire J Steele-Elliott, reprinted 1993 by Bedfordshire Natural History Society (first edition published 1897-1901)

First for Britain and Ireland 1660-1999 Philip Palmer 2000

Rare Birds in Britain & Ireland – a photographic record David Cotteridge and Keith Vinicombe 1996