The Quilters. Part 3

(2) The ITINERANT QUILTER, who went from farm to farm, staying at each for some weeks to renew the stock of quilts, was a familiar figure of the countryside in South Wales and Radnorshire about fifty years ago. The farmer supplied all the materials and sometimes there was a frame in the farmhouse, but more often the quilter brought her own. Presumably a farmer's wife was too busy herself to make the great number of quilts which would be needed, for the farmhands as well as for the family. Two sisters at Guisborough in Yorkshire, about 1870-80, used to go to the big houses and farms for several weeks at a time, dressmaking and quilting, being paid a few shillings weekly. In County Durham Mrs. Lough recalled that her great aunt stayed with them for a month each year and quilted for her keep, but this was a family arrangement. I could find no other memory of itinerant quilters in the North, but since dressmaking was often combined with quilting in Wales, it is likely that the North Country dressmaker who periodically went to work in the big houses for a week or so, also made a few quilts. The North Country farmhouse seems to have used just as many quilts as the Welsh one. Was the Welshwoman's time more occupied with farm work, or did she have fewer skilled needlewomen, relatives and hired help, in the house, that she had to depend on the itinerant quilter to maintain the stock of quilts which her North Country counterpart seems to have produced unaided, together with innumerable rag rugs? "If I rightly remember, she did not have a home ; it was going about like that she was," I was told of one Welsh itinerant quilter. "They called her Y Gwiltreg; in Llangendeime and Crwbin district she was." Of another: "The quilting woman would go around the farms making cwiltiau stafell (dowry quilts). Not all of them spent their whole time on the road, some were village quilters working in their own homes and visiting the farms occasionally.

Fifty years ago one of these itinerant quilters was paid nine pence a day, and another at about the same date had from sixpence to a shilling, and another "one shilling daily and food, and a rest day on Sunday." Miss Annie Williams used to go about to farms, staying usually a week or so, till a quilt was finished; at first this must have been in the 1890 she was paid ten pence a day, "I started work at eight in the morning and no one'd tell me when to stop. I had my lodging and food; they didn't think anything on the food then." In later years she got as much as three shillings a day, and the same amount was mentioned by another quilter ; this is the highest rate heard of. Mrs. Kate Davies (Cardiganshire) writes that "quilters working at farmhouses were paid the same rate as dressmakers, from one and three to one and six a day with board," and Mrs. M. J. Davies of Pembrokeshire knew several quilters who travelled the farms and were paid two shillings and sixpence a day for "making the facings (presumably patchwork) and quilting them."

These refer to uncertain dates, probably in the first decade of this century. The custom of travelling the farms seems to have died out many years ago; I have spoken to a number of old quilters who did it in their youth, perhaps until they were 44 married, but I have not heard of it being done in the last twenty years or so. Sometimes two or three quilters went together; Mrs. Evans of Llanrhystyd (Cardiganshire), when she was apprenticed, used to go with her teacher to work on farms ; they made a quilt in from five to seven days. Groups of two or three girls travelling the farms and working together on the frame have been heard of. Several quilters have told us how they took the opportunity to learn the craft from one of these itinerant quilters during her visit to their home. When a farmer's daughter was to be married the quilter would be sent for in good time and might stay a month or more, until six quilts were completed for the dowry. One gets the impression, in talking to the old ladies who were itinerant quilters in their younger days, that their life was a pleasant and interesting one. Farm fare was good and ample, although they might sleep rough, and for a few weeks they became one of the busy farm community and no doubt shared in the excitement of the wedding preparations when they were making an important part of the dowry. (3) It seems likely that QUILT CLUBS originated in the Welsh mining valleys and the pit villages of County Durham and Northumberland in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It happened only too often that a miner's wife found herself a widow, or with a disabled husband, and had to seek some means of supporting herself and her children. If she was skilled in the craft of quilting, she thought of her frame ; there were her potential customers, hundreds of them, living close together all around her; she could make something gay and pretty for which there was always a need in every household. But how was she to find enough money to buy the fifteen yards of sateen, half a dozen reels of cotton and several pounds of wadding needed? Miners were earning low wages and no customer would advance that money ; even when she had made her quilt it might be long before any of her neighbours would find ready cash to pay for it. So she thought of the instalment system and started her quilt club. Mrs, Hope said that her mother in 1887 was left a widow with five children and "brought them up by quilting”; when the four daughters were old enough they helped her at the frame; four working together could turn out four quilts weekly. Once by a terrific effort they made a quilt in a day for a customer about to sail for America. Later they ran their own clubs and all became w r ell known locally as excellent quilters. A Northumberland woman said her mother, working with a neighbour, took "a month or less" to produce a club quilt; Mrs. Hicks and her mother completed one in a fortnight, but Mrs. Frizzel alone turned them out at the same rate. Mrs. J. Hitchcock, whose mother, a widow with six children, started her quilt club about 1 890, recalled that wages were paid fortnightly and so the club contributions were similarly collected, but weekly collection seems to have been more usual. Two shillings was the weekly instalment in a Tweed mouth club between the wars, but one shilling was more often mentioned, or sometimes "one or two shillings a week." Mrs. Graham started her club when her widowed mother-in-law came to live with her; there were several children and only small wages coming in; they made a total of two hundred quilts. The clubs became very popular; one quilter enrolled forty members, another boasted: "Ma mither had the roon of the place for quilts." These instances are from Northumberland, where there were clubs in Amble, Bedlington and Tweedmouth, and County Durham, where information was collected about some dozen clubs in the pit villages and at least two in Jarrow, one run by two maiden ladies in reduced circumstances, and the other by a woman with a ne'er-do-well husband and several children to bring up. There must have been many more in the period from 1887 until textile rationing put an end to them during the 1939-45 war. In the South Wales coalfield in 1928 there were still a number of quilt clubs, but because of the terrible industrial depression at that time they were less flourishing than they had been when most households had one or two men at work. The Chapel quilt clubs were a great feature of the North, organized like a private club, but for the benefit of chapel funds; they often produced rag mats as well as quilts. The quilt frame, In fact, seems to have taken the place now held by the whist drive as a money-raiser. Amble's (Northumberland) war memorial (1918) was provided by a tremendous communal quilt-making effort by every denomination; about a hundred quilts were finally displayed in the village hall and the fact that there were customers for so many shows the popularity of the work at that time. Several North Country Women's Institutes raised funds for themselves in their early days by raffling quilts which were worked on by members co-operatively. This idea became so popular at one time that a group of Hexhamshire members decided to make one, even though none of them felt equal to designing it. They got a pattern drawn on paper from a Durham woman (the only instance of such a procedure that I have heard of) and cut their own templates. It was set up in a member's house and the middle section was worked first, which seems to have been considered very unusual in Northumberland though it was sometimes done in Wales. Seven or eight members worked on it, but not all at one time ; anyone who could spare an hour or two would come in and do a bit. It was a handsome piece of work and well done, but they did not make another. The Northumberland federation recently had a cooperative quilt worked in their Newcastle office by members from all over the county, and this was raffled and brought in a large sum. Mrs. Grays Brown recalled how in her mother *s home in the west of Northumberland a frame was set up in the kitchen to raise money for the church in the early years of this century ; anyone from the village who could quilt came in and worked on it, the lady of the house supervising the pattern.

It is difficult to give with accuracy the rates of payment in force at various dates because, although many people remember clearly the sums their mother or grandmother earned, they cannot so definitely assign dates. There seems to have been a good deal of variation in payment from one district to another; a quilter's skill and local reputation might enable her to ask a higher fee, but this does not seem to have been always the case. Possibly a local scarcity of village quilters, or some wave of prosperity among their customers, raised the rate of payment. The only written evidence I have come across is a notebook kept by Mrs. Lace of Aberdare when she began to make quilts for orders during a long coal strike in 1907, to help feed her three small children. She was paid five shillings for the first order and from five to twelve shillings for others, according to pattern; during the year she earned ten guineas by making twenty-six quilts an average of about eight shillings. This tallies pretty well with other people's statements about earnings. The information on rates of payment at various dates is tabulated in Appendix I, in which an estimate of average weekly earnings is given. Village quilters working for a living may have spent long days at the frame, especially in summer, but those who had quilt clubs were generally the mothers of families and their work must have been interrupted by necessary cooking and housework. The quitter's earnings seem to have been, on the whole, lower in Wales than in the North Country. For instance, Mrs. E. A. Williams (Carmarthenshire) said that her grannie thought herself well paid (probably about 1900) with five shillings, and this was the rate mentioned by several others ; but the only worker I heard of earning so little in the North was one in West Auckland whom Mrs. Elizabeth Black used to watch as a girl, who made a club quilt weekly for five shillings, and very rough the work was, with only the simplest patterns, such as diamonds with twist border.

Quilters are still working for very low wages, which are no longer due to the poverty of the customers (as was the case in the mining districts in the 'twenties) ; comparatively expensive materials, costing several times the amount paid to the worker, are often chosen. These low rates are earned by workers who are not merely skilled needlewomen; they are also skilled designers and every quilt must be separately planned and marked. To earn a living by quilting has always meant long hours of close application to the frame and yet the old quilters who have lived by their craft do not often speak of it as drudgery; they were always able to enjoy the creative element in the work, to delight in a new pattern, to recall the triumph of achieving a particularly fine one, and that is what they chiefly remember.