The Quilters. Part 2

Mrs. Bowen (from a Pembrokeshire family) told how her mother made her first quilt in 1 873 at Clynderwen, in the home of the Gower family where she was chambermaid. It was a big household, with twenty-two servants, and when the dressmaker paid her annual visit and stayed for some weeks, making ball dresses and other gowns for the ladies, all the cuttings were saved and given to the maids to make into patchwork. When a "facing" was complete the maker was given a piece of print for the backing and then it was set up in the frame and quilted. Mrs. Bowen still has the quilt made by her mother in this way, of silk "patches" in rich and gay colours, with a Paisley-style print on the reverse side. "The old lady," she said, "didn't like the maids to go out at night and so encouraged them to stay in and work at their quilts." The professional quilters I will classify as (1) VILLAGE QUILTERS, of whom there were many throughout South Wales and some in the North Country, and with them I include the North Country pattern-markers; (2) ITINERANT QUILTERS, seldom heard of outside South Wales, and (3) women who ran QUILT CLUBs, which were a feature of the mining districts in both areas. (1) VILLAGE QUILTERS. A certain Mary Jones of Panteg near Llanarth (Cardiganshire), commonly known as "Mari Panteg," who died about 1900, seems to have been one of the most famous of "Welsh village quilters and is perhaps typical of them all. Many people in that district still treasure her quilts ; she had orders for miles around, particularly from girls about to be married. She lived in a primitive little stone cottage of one storey and worked by the light of a tiny single-paned window. One of her quilts which I have seen, made about 1850 when she was a young woman, is a good piece of work, closely stitched in an elaborate pattern, and was said to be typical.

She is reputed to have been able to sew as well with her left hand as with her right. " Morning and night she was at them," but, working with her apprentice, she would hardly make two quilts in a week and she never had more than four and six or five shillings for the making. It was the general rule that customers brought their own materials to be quilted and paid for the work. One quilt a fortnight was said by several people to be the usual rate of output for a professional quilter working alone, but there were many variations. As in the north some worked late "with a candle on the quilt" and others only by daylight. Mrs. Katherine Evans, fifty years ago, worked only eight days on a handsome quilt with a good deal of close stitching in it, which she was still (in 1950) keeping unused for her niece.

Mrs. Eleanor Williams said it took her two weeks to make a quilt, working from eight or nine in the morning till about six and only stopping to eat (but her working time must have been shorter in winter, for she only worked by daylight) ; what I have seen of her work is much rougher than Mrs. Evans's, with simple patterns. Mrs. Colman, an elderly woman quilting for her living, completes a quilt in four or five days and it is well drawn and sewn, though the patterns are big and widely spaced, with no close work. A North Country woman, Mrs. Reaveley, said that in her young days she could make a quilt in two weeks, sitting close at it and working all day and by lamplight too. In all these cases the time included designing and marking the patterns as the work proceeded, but another North Country woman, Mrs. Johnson known as Joe the Quilter, of Warden, Northumberland, late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Owned by Mrs. Gibson, Hexham of Allendale, told how it took herself, her mother and a friend ten days to sew a quilt on which the pattern had already been drawn. This was very close and elaborate work. Even considering the lower cost of living some fifty years or more ago, and the simple way of life in the villages, one wonders how the labour of the professional quilters really provided them with a living; live they did, however, many of them to a ripe old age. In the North there were also many women who made quilts to order for a living, generally in the rural districts such as Weardale and Allendale and the more northern and westerly parts of Northumberland; in the pit villages quilt clubs (see below) were the rule, though work on club quilts might be interrupted for a " ready-money order” Some workers supplied shops in the towns (as also happened in South Wales), and Miss Humble, already mentioned, had many orders from the U.S.A. through a relative who had emigrated; other orders from America and also Australia and elsewhere far afield have been mentioned. Quilting was sometimes a sideline to dressmaking and probably had been so since the eighteenth century or earlier. Miss Annie Williams went at the age of eighteen to learn dressmaking from an old woman in a Carmarthenshire village and "picked up" the quilting at the same time. In the same way Mrs. Parker (Durham) learned to quilt when she served her time with a tailor-dressmaker; afterwards she used to mark the patterns on quilts for her mother and in later years she was well known as a very fine quilter. "Joe the quilter," who is Northumberland's rival to Mari Panteg and who was born about 1750 , was intended by his father to be a tailor, and was probably apprenticed to one such and learnt quilting as a part of the trade. By the time Joe began to work on his own, quilted waistcoats and underskirts would be going out of fashion and we can imagine that his taste for gay and elaborate design, indicated by one of his surviving quilts, inclined him to concentrate on quilting and patchwork in preference to the more austere kind of tailoring which was becoming the vogue. Certainly he earned his living by those crafts in his old age, until he was murdered, at the age of seventy-six, in 1825, in his cottage near Warden village for the sake of his rumoured wealth (see Appendix II). His work was well known locally and some of it is said to have gone to America. There are still a number of women in both the quilting areas who supplement small incomes by making quilts for private customers or shops, but the days are past when girls worked as a Durham woman has described: "From leaving school at fourteen until I married I had to sit and quilt, day in and out, and no sooner one out of the frame until another in, and me all the time longing to be out with the other young people; my mother trying to talk to me and me not answering." That memory (of about 1927) gives the darker side of the picture of quilting in the twentieth century. The village quilter who was a single woman often took an apprentice. In this way Mrs. Lewis learnt to quilt, at the age of sixteen, from Mari Panteg, in order to support her widowed mother who did not come from a quilting family. No payment was made on either side but the pupil did odd jobs for her teacher as well as helping her at the frame. In another case of apprenticeship in Wales the girl lived with her teacher, to whom her parents paid two pounds, presumably for her board for the year. Although Mrs. Thomas (quoted above) spoke of a girl serving her time for two years, one year seems to have been usual in Wales. In the Weardale and Allendale districts of County Durham and Northumberland there was and still is another kind of professional worker in the quilting industry the patternmarker, or "stamper" as she is sometimes called. Generally a quilter designs and marks her own patterns (see Chapters Four and Six), but pattern-markers who were not necessarily quilters themselves have been known in the past. In the middle of the eighteenth century a schoolmaster in the village of Mayfield in Sussex, called Walter Gale, who was "undoubtedly a craftsman and a man of parts . . . began to supplement his salary from jobs which varied from decorating inn signs in the neighbourhood to painting the commandments in the chancel of the church. ... He drew patterns for ladies 5 embroidery and helped to create designs for gentlemen's waistcoats. It took him five days of close application to draw the pattern on one quilt, for which he charged nineteen shillings and sixpence. The lady was pleased with the work but (her husband said) it was a pretty deal of money." A London haberdasher in the same century advertised that he drew "all sorts of Patterns" (see Appendix I) which probably included designs for quilting. It seems likely that so long as quilting was in vogue for adorning the clothing and bed furnishings of the fashionable world there would be men skilled in drawing designs for the work, just as there were (even up to about thirty years ago) men "prickers" who designed and pricked the parchments which serve as patterns for pillow-lace makers. The evidence indicates that they studied the technique of the crafts for which they designed and their patterns would therefore be far more suitable than most of the "transfer" designs sold nowadays. During the latter half of the nineteenth century a certain George Gardiner of Allendale in Northumberland marked patterns on "quilt tops." He had many followers, but I have been unable to discover whether he had any immediate predecessors to link him with the eighteenth-century markers. Like Walter Gale, he was a man of parts; he kept the Allenheads village shop (and a lovely shop it was, as old people in the village will still tell you) in Mill Cottages, Dirt Pot which is now more politely known as Ropehaugh, though a Youth Hostel preserves the old name. He also trimmed hats, and girls would walk up from Allendale Town or over the fells from Wearhead (some six or seven miles) to get their hats trimmed by his master hand. He introduced a new style of design for quilts, which became very popular in Weardale and throughout Northumberland; he taught his wife's two nieces, who were brought up by the Gardiners, to quilt and mark patterns, and one of them is still active, but his most notable pupil was Elizabeth Sanderson, who served her time with him as apprentice and became even more famous than he as a "stamper." The terms "stamper" and "stamped quilt" were used in the belief that Miss Sanderson had some method of marking the design by a transfer, but in fact it was drawn, in exact detail, on the material with a blue pencil. She was paid from one shilling and sixpence to two shillings for marking a quilt top, but she could mark two in a day.

Whether Walter Gale's fiveday design was much larger and more elaborate, or whether he was merely slower because he was inexperienced in quilting, we do not know, but Fig. 14 shows that Miss Sanderson's work was far from simple. The Misses Johnson in Hexhamshire recalled how Tommy Bell, the packman, had one or two of these drawn quilt tops, as samples, among the goods which he carried from farm to farm, just as pedlars in America sold patterns for quilting, as well as patchwork designs and weaving drafts. The English quilt tops were ordered by farmers' wives who wanted to make something specially grand, or to give to a quilter as a wedding present. Miss Sanderson was herself a skilled quilter, as her "Red Star" quilt shows, but pattern-marking seems to have been her main livelihood and she left entirely to her sister the management of their farm at Fawside Green, Allenheads. She is said to have "made a tidy bit in her time" and became so well known that she sometimes employed other workers in Allendale to make quilts for her. George Gardiner had died shortly before the turn of the century ; Miss Sanderson died in 1934. at the age of seventy-three, but her pupils continue to this day to mark the same type of pattern, which must now have been in use for nearly a hundred years. She taught many girls to quilt and mark patterns ; her first apprentice who is very proud of this priority was the daughter of a farming butcher at the head of Weardale. On leaving school at the age of fourteen, in the eighteen-nineties, she set out one morning to walk the six miles over the fell to Allenheads, carrying her provisions for the week bread, butter, sugar and so forth. She served for one year without any payment on either side, going home at the end of each week and setting out again on Monday with her rations. She then became a paid hand, earning about four shillings a week and her board and lodging. As Mrs. Coulthard of Weardale she is still a noted quilter, using the Durham feather patterns as well as the designs she learnt from Miss Sanderson, and she has marked many quilt tops for others. Mrs. Peart of Allendale was apprenticed a little later; she also started at the age of fourteen and served for a year without payment, taking her own food.

She worked from eight in the morning till seven at night, with an hour off for dinner and half an hour for tea, and she served for six years, being paid two shillings weekly in the second year and finally four shillings. In 1952 she was charging five shillings for marking a quilt top, or seven shillings if the material was silk, and she has had orders from many parts of England and even from Wales, and has had one apprentice herself, who Is still at work. A high-light in Mrs. Coulthard 's apprenticeship was the time of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, when they Incorporated the Queen's head in a quilt pattern. Mrs. Peart treasures the memory of how she worked on some silk quilts for a local titled lady an unusual order at that time and on one occasion helped her teacher draw a quilt top for a Sunderland women's guild to work for Queen Mary.