War Crochet

On Friday at Lee Mills, the hardiest of the volunteers were looking through boxes of assorted crochet downstairs in the cold.  (The rest of us were sorting pattern leaflets upstairs in the warm office.)    In one of the boxes, they found some wonderful filet crochet items from World War I.  One is a small piece with little strings of beads (alternately blue and clear glass) around the edge to weight it down - a milk jug or sugar bowl cover, to keep off the dust or flies.   Such covers are usually circular, but this one is rectangular, presumably because that shape fits the "Success to the Allies" slogan better.

The other item is a small table cloth (about 33 in./85 cm. square), in plain white cotton with an edging of filet crochet.

 

Along each side is the slogan "Welcome home" with some sort of naval ship on either side, and in each corner there are crossed British and French flags and an anchor.

To go with these, the week before I had found a bound collection of World War I women's magazines at Lee Mills.  They are in very poor condition, but mostly readable, and they are full of crochet patterns, including a few "war" designs.

Waterplane design, Woman's Own, January 15 1916 

"A Patriotic Tea Cosy", Woman's Own, March 11 1916

The "Welcome Home" cloth is touching, because presumably it was made in anticipation of a sailor coming home on leave, or at the end of the war, by someone in his family.  But the "Success to the Allies" piece doesn't seem very helpful to the war effort, although at least it does acknowledge that there is a war on. The magazines do have quite a few patterns for garments for the armed forces, mainly knitting patterns, but there are probably more patterns for decorative bits of crochet (doyleys, fancy edgings, and so on). Given our current view of the horrors of the First World War, it seems callously frivolous to spend hours on fine crochet work rather than something more useful, but maybe it seemed different at the time.