1919

I'm still catching up on writing about Shetland Wool Week, and this post is about the talk I gave at the Shetland Museum as part of the Wool Week programme.  My talk was on the Knitting & Crochet Guild, but mostly about the Guild's collection. I talked about a few selected pieces from the collection, and we had a display of the actual items at the front of the auditorium, so that the audience could have a close look, before and after the talk.

I picked some things that had a particular connection to Wool Week, including a few that originated in Shetland.  But this post is about one of the pieces on display that has nothing to do with Shetland, or wool, for that matter.  I chose it because it's relevant to 2019 - it was made exactly 100 years ago, in 1919.

Cloth with 'Peace 1919' filet crochet border 

It's a tea cloth with a filet crochet border, and a linen or cotton centre with drawn thread work.  There are doves with sprigs of olive in their beaks along the sides, and 'Peace 1919' in each corner.

We know that the First World War ended on November 11th 1918, but strictly speaking that was the day of the Armistice between the Allies and Germany.  Formally, the war ended with the Peace Treaty signed in 1919 - so that many war memorials in Britain give the dates of the war as 1914 to 1919. (The Shetland war memorial in Lerwick does, in fact.)

There were peace celebrations in the summer of 1919, and someone must have made the 'Peace 1919' tea cloth then, and perhaps used it at a celebration tea party. Before I went to Shetland, John and I set up a tea party setting, with the tea cloth, and a filet crochet tea cosy that was also made in 1919, with the slogan '1914 1919 Victorious Peace'.   You can also see a set of First World War medals on the table, that belonged to one of John's grandfathers.  The cloth only fits a very small table, as you can see, so it must have been an intimate, rather low-key tea party.

Here's a better view of the 'Victorious Peace' tea cosy:

I wrote about the tea cosy here, after I had found the pattern for its other side (which shows a very decorative, slightly Art Nouveau teapot) in a 1918 issue of Woman's Weekly magazine.

I hoped then to find the pattern for the 'Victorious Peace' side of the tea cosy in a 1919 issue of Woman's Weekly, and on a later visit to the British Library I looked through all the 1919 issues.  I didn't find the tea cosy, but I did find the pattern for the 'Peace 1919' table cloth, on the front cover of the April 19th issue.

The magazine gave instructions for a corner, and for one of the doves along the side of the border. So you could make your table cloth as large as you wanted, just by adding more doves.   For comparison, here are a corner and a dove from the edge of our tea cloth. 

And I did eventually find the pattern for the 'Victorious Peace' tea cosy - not in Woman's Weekly, but in another weekly magazine for women, Home Companion, in the August 2nd issue.

(Home Companion is long gone - it ceased publication in 1956 - but Woman's Weekly is flourishing, and still publishes knitting and crochet patterns. )

The Peace 1919 tea cloth is a really excellent piece of work.  The crochet is very even, and the border fits the centre cloth exactly.  I'm not sure how that was done: it would be very difficult to make the border to a precise size, I think, so perhaps the cloth was made afterwards.  Not sure. And though I know almost nothing about drawn thread work, I am very impressed by the quality of the work in the centre of the cloth.  Here's a corner of the drawn thread work, and a close-up of a detail - so painstaking, to weave the fine cotton around the threads to make something quite solid again.

Making the cloth must have taken many hours.  And I wonder how often it was actually used - perhaps a few times in 1919, but maybe not much after that?   It has survived in very good condition, which suggests that it might have spent most of the last hundred years in a drawer.  Now it commemorates not just the end of a dreadful war but the skill of its unknown maker, too.

PS Apologies for the quality of the photos. The cloth is actually quite white, even though it looks grey-ish in the photos.  Flash washes out the detail, and increasing the contrast after taking the photos looks artificial.  Ignore the grey, and just imagine that it's white. 

Rosebud

We have recently received a donation to the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection of a set of doll's clothes, and the doll they were made for.  She is not very pretty, to be honest, but at least she's very well-dressed.

I think that originally there might have been another doll, with dark hair, because she is one of the Rosebud twin dolls that featured in many issues of Woman's Weekly in the 1950s - the magazine published knitting patterns for outfits for the twins.  And many of the outfits that came with our doll are in pairs, in two different colourways - there is another pair of dungarees and a jumper to go under them, for instance.

The pattern for the dungarees and jumper outfit was published in March 1951, and the dolls are featured on the cover.

Woman's Weekly, March 3rd 1951

 

"Oh, what a lovely bouquet! Is it really for us?"

The illustrations to the patterns show the twins in various poses, intended I suppose to make them look a bit more life-like.  The magazine gave details of the dolls and how you could buy them by post.  They were 6½ inches high (16.5 cm.) and each doll cost 2s 6d - that's 12½p, directly translated.  And of course: "please state whether a blonde or brunette doll is required when sending your order."

Here are some more of our doll's outfits - a very pretty blouse and skirt, a vest and knickers, and a siren suit.

I am sure that they were knitted from Woman's Weekly patterns too, but we don't have a complete set of the 1950s issues.  (Probably just as well, as we would need to store more than 500 issues.) We do have several more patterns for the twins' outfits, including a very comprehensive outfit from 1957: underwear, dress, socks, shoes, mittens, hat and coat.

My grandma read Woman's Weekly every week and knitted clothes for my doll from it, and I thought that she used the patterns for the Rosebud twins.  But I think I was wrong - Dolly was bigger.  And more lovable, too - apart from being not very pretty, a 6½ inch doll is too small to be cuddly.  Woman's Weekly had patterns for other sizes of doll occasionally, so perhaps one day I will see one that I recognise.  (Sadly, Dolly and her clothes have not survived - she succumbed to a nasty plastic disease long ago.)

Me with Dolly, and my Grandad and sister

The Face of the Fifties

For me, the face of the 1950s is the face of Woman's Weekly in the 1950s.   My Grandma bought the magazine every week, and once I could read, I used to look through it and try to make sense of it.  I was mainly interested in the knitting patterns for twin dolls, and Grandma made some of them for me, but the rest of it - The Man Who Sees, Mary Marryat, the Robin family - was a bit baffling.   I have met 1950s copies again since I started sorting out the publications in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection.  We don't have a complete collection by any means - it would be enormous.  But knitting has been an important component of Woman's Weekly magazine for a long time, and certainly was in the 1950s, so it deserves a place in the collection.

One model appears on the cover of the 1950s Woman's Weekly very frequently, and I think of her as the face of the magazine at that time. She was very slim and elegant, with very neat and carefully arranged hair.
  

Woman's Weekly, November 27, 1954

In fact, I know from the copies in the collection that she started modelling in the 1940s, and appeared on Woman's Weekly covers then, though I think not so often as in the 1950s. She apparently had much longer hair then, and wore it in one of those complicated constructions that remind me of a mediaeval head-dress. (And I do wonder how they managed to make their hair stay put, in the days before sophisticated hair product. Lots of hair-pins, I suppose.)

Woman's Weekly, August 23, 1947

She also did some modelling for Bestway and Weldon's pattern leaflets, which  like Woman's Weekly were published by the Amalgamated Press, Ltd.

Bestway 2071

Weldons 1002

Altogether, hers is a very familiar face.  She appeared in Woman's Weekly throughout the 1950s - I have seen her on a 1959 issue.  But I didn't know her name.  Models appearing in weekly magazines were not usually famous, unlike Kate Moss and other super-models.

Then last year, Woman's Weekly published a series, "A Vintage View", based on their archives. There was one issue for each decade of the 20th century since 1911, when the magazine started, and of course my anonymous model featured significantly in the 1950s issue.  And amazingly, I now know who she was; here's the caption to one of the covers that she appeared on:

"A favourite face  Model Patricia Squires often featured on our covers.  She was married with a son and had a nanny so she could continue working."     

It must have been very unusual for a woman in the 1950s to pay for child-care so that she could continue to work.  I am really pleased to be able to put a name to the face.

Next : the face of the 1930s. Who was this woman?