May Morris 1862-1938 by Adèle Geras

This is May Morris, daughter of William Morris. You can see, I think, that she is a woman of considerable character and intelligence. The exhibition that's just finished at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow shows her to be also extremely gifted as an artist and embroiderer. A mere glance at Wikipedia will show you  that she was also a business woman, running her father's company with enormous competence, all the while careful of the conditions of the people (mostly women) who worked under her eye. She campaigned. She worked. She made beautiful things. She had friends. She married Henry Halliday Sparling, secretary of the Socialist League. She had a romance with George Bernard Shaw. Because the Art Workers' Guild didn't admit women, she founded  the Women's Guild of Arts. And to judge by the quotation below, this was what was expected of you if you were born a Morris. To say that William expected great things was an understatement. I have to admit I laughed out loud when I read the quote below and I'll reproduce it here for those with poor eyesight: If a chap can't compose an epic poem while weaving a tapestry, he'd better shut up, he'll never do any good at all." All I could think was: lucky for May that she could easily live up to such standards.

And to prove that she knew her worth, here's a quotation which I'll also reproduce: I'm a remarkable woman - always was, though none of you seemed to think so. This remark makes me wonder whether her father took her a little for granted.

But now she's appreciated in her own right. This exhibition showed off her many talents to the full. As well as the embroideries and  drawings, such as the one....

....shown below, which is part of a pattern that would later become a hanging, all  her gifts are amply demonstrated.  Everyone knows the famous quotation from William Morris about having nothing in your house that isn't beautiful or useful, and clearly May was brought up with this belief and made very many beautiful things, both in her own right and also supervising the work of the wallpaper business that changed the decorating habits of the nation. She lived in Kelmscott Manor in the Cotswolds, and from 1917 her companion was a woman called Mary Lobb. 

After walking through the exhibition, I was all ready to buy LOTS of postcards to remind me of May Morris's achievements. I had even hoped for a fridge magnet to add to my collection. This image, below and the photograph of May which I've used above were some of the very few images available. It was most frustrating, particularly because William's designs are more than ubiquitous. They are overpoweringly everywhere in every imaginable incarnation: notebooks, cushion covers, mirrors...you name it.

And yes, I understand that they can't produce a great deal of stuff  for an exhibition that's small and temporary, but still, I thought it ironic that the daughter was in the shadow of her father, at least as far as merchandising is concerned! A small quibble after such a wonderful show of a particular woman's talents.  May Morris fought to have embroidery brought out of the purely domestic sphere into the world of art and here it was, on display to hundreds of admiring people. I loved seeing these works and learning more about the woman who made them.  

THREADS: the delicate life of John Craske by Adèle Geras

There are many kinds of books in the world. Some, you quite  fancy when you hear about them. Others you know you have no interest in at all. With a few you think: I'll wait for the paperback. And then there are the ones that you have to have the minute you read about them. In hardback. However expensive, and the sooner the better. 

On April 11th, 2015, I read Rachel Campbell-Johnston's review of THREADS by Julia Blackburn in the Times and I bought the book as soon as I possibly could. It was a volume I had to have in my possession, on my shelf at once, and when I got it, I dropped every other book that I was reading and started it immediately. To say this was a pleasure is an understatement. In every possible respect (production, paper, cover, illustrations, and above all the text itself) this book is a thing of beauty. You need to pick it up and touch the smooth pages and feel for yourself the heft and weight of it. 

More than anything  else, though, it was the subject that drew me.  I am interested in artists who have no training, and I love seascapes of every kind. Also, I am fascinated by embroidery in all its manifestations  (see the History Girls post I wrote after a trip to Bayeux) and I support the charity Fine Cell Work who give male prisoners a chance to express themselves creatively and in the process find some measure of rehabilitation.

When I read about John Craske, I was quite determined to go and see the exhibition that Julia Blackburn put together in Norwich.
The book details her search through the obscurer parts of Norfolk to find out what she could about this amazing artist who spent much of his life in a small cottage first painting images of the sea on every imaginable surface and then embroidering the most astonishing art on to a piece of cloth stretched on to a frame. I'm afraid that I failed in this ambition and the illustrations in this post come from my amateur photographs of pages of my book. I went to the wrong place....the website was ambiguous to say the least and directed me and my companion on the trip, Helen Craig, to a place which was shut in a way that looked as though it had no hope of ever opening again. There was no poster advertising the exhibition anywhere in Norwich and the kind folk we asked at the Cathedral knew nothing about it.....I feel sad to have missed it, and will treasure my book even more. I live in hope that the exhibition, which finished too soon for me to revisit, moves to somewhere else.

Craske, born in 1881, was a fisherman from a family whose lives were bound up with the sea. It was Craske's  natural habitat and his whole life was  spent on it, beside it and depicting it in paint and thread. He fell ill at the age of 36, and from then on, he described himself as being in a 'stuporous state.'  From 1923 onwards, he painted the sea until he could no longer stand. The embroidery happened when painting became too difficult for him.  Valentine  Ackland, and her lover, Sylvia Townsend Warner, discovered him and championed him and that provided some money at least.  Some people in the thirties (Peter Pears, for instance)  were aware of him, and thought highly of him, and there is one newspaper cutting reproduced in Threads, but he never became fashionable, unlike his contemporary, Alfred Wallis of Cornwall.  Craske's devoted wife looked after him. Her name was Laura and she cared for him till the end of his life. The review by Claire Harman in the Guardian provides a good overview of his life and a wonderful description of the book, and I do urge you to read it. I'm grateful to Sally Prue for pointing it out to me. 

Blackburn is a wonderful writer. Her account of how she looked for Craske and uncovered the details of his life reminds me very much of W.G.Sebald's Rings of Saturn. She doesn't stick to the main biographical thrust of the narrative but wanders in and out of many places, meeting strange people and seeing wondrous things. You want to make notes to prompt yourself to follow her on the journey she took. I have a whole notebook full of leads to chase up one day. Meanwhile, an exhibition in the gallery of Norwich University of the Arts is a good start to getting Craske's name to a greater public, though it's disturbing that so little sign of the show was visible in Norwich. This seems spookily of a piece with his invisibility throughout his life, and  points to a flower that's born to blush unseen, but that's not quite true. I'm sure LOTS of admirers have visited the gallery and enjoyed his work first hand and the hope is  that the word will keep spreading and that more people will become aware of  this amazing and almost forgotten artist's life and work.

By the end of Threads, you know about Craske, but you also know about Julia Blackburn. Her husband, the sculptor Herman Makkink, dies suddenly and she becomes a widow.  The way she describes widowhood touched me very much. I felt she'd expressed much of what I felt when I lost my husband, in 2013. She was urged to go on working by her late husband, and it is the work, she says, which ensures that life goes on: that and the birth of a grandchild. Blackburn has gone on working in great style with this book about Craske, restoring some of her own life in the process of describing his.

And I, because I missed the exhibition, went to the Cathedral in Norwich. Any readers of this blog will know I have a love of cathedrals and this one is beautiful. I was glad to have had the opportunity to see it. I also saw a terrific collection of teapots in the Castle Museum....that's something I'd never have found in the normal course of events, and I felt quite Julia Blackburn-like about the pleasure of bumping into unexpected things.  On the train home from Norwich, Helen Craig took a most beautiful photograph of the sky, which is as interesting as the sea, and I'm putting it up at the end of this post for everyone to share. 

Please do not miss this book.  The photo above shows the back of one of Craske's embroideries and, like the rest of his work, it's lovely. Threads is easily the best non-fiction book I've read in years and years: always accessible, never obscure, endlessly fascinating and full of the strangest and most unusual characters.

THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY....which is not a tapestry. BY Adèle Geras

Most people know the main facts about the Bayeux Tapestry. First, that it isn't a tapestry at all but an embroidery. It was made, probably near Canterbury in the years between 1066 and 1077 when Odo, William the Conqueror's half brother and bishop of the Cathedral in Bayeux, released it (I use the word advisedly) as a magnificent piece of Norman propaganda.  The spin (again advisedly used) he put on the story of Harold's death and the subsequent triumph of his half-brother was a firmly pro-Norman one.  During the Middle Ages, it was unveiled once a year to the congregation in  July on the day known as the Fête des Réliques.

Scholars think it was made in England, but no one knows exactly who stitched it. It is made up of 58 scenes (the last few scenes are missing) and is about 70  metres long. It's composed of  nine linen bands sewn together.   The story it tells runs from left to right, like a long, long comic book strip. It is, if you like, a graphic novel in wool.

There are eight different shades of the woollen yarn, dyed naturally by madder, woad and the like. 

The pictures I've put up here show some of the action, and action from beginning to end is what this story is. There are sea voyages, equipping and providing for an army on the march, funeral rites, cooking and much else. There is feasting, and fighting and dying.  There are ships, buildings and landscapes. There are soldiers, priests, women, men in every imaginable position and some of these can not be reproduced in a family blog. All Human Life is There, the News of the World used to proclaim and it's as true of this embroidery as it is of the now-defunct  newspaper. 

The natural world is here too: the sea, animals both real and imaginary, and many trees. The ones shown in the picture above are typical. The intertwined branches of the tree appear over and over again:  a  stylised and extremely beautiful shorthand that says TREE. I am not sure when the municipality of Bayeux chose this image as a kind of symbol, but you see it everywhere in the town  on round  brass plaques set into the pavement. There's a motto that goes with it, too:  La qualité a ses racines.   I'd translate this roughly as : Class doesn't come out of nowhere, and in Bayeux it's true: there has clearly been beauty here from the moment the town was laid out,  centuries ago, and the embroidery is a huge part of that. The Museum is a World Heritage site.

I've chosen two photos, above and below this paragraph, to show off the horses. They are a  striking feature of the whole 70 metres and are seen in such wonderful detail that there is a difference between how they look when they're trotting, walking and, as above, galloping into battle. In the picture below this paragraph, they are falling down in the midst of the battle and the detail throughout is such that in another scene, there's a horse getting out of a Viking ship....leaving one of his legs behind till the last moment. In the 11th century, perspective isn't yet fully there, but still the things and people further away are shown as smaller.  I also noticed that the borders were used in all kinds of modern ways....the dead shown along the bottom of the battle scenes reminded me of  scrolling headlines on television news channels.

Two things struck me as I walked past it twice, very slowly. The first was simply what an enormous undertaking this was for the women ( or maybe men too...monks, perhaps) who made it. It must have involved large numbers of people, each working on a section. That's clear, but something that I also thought was that this was a work of art that had an overriding artist, or designer behind it. Someone. ONE person. An organising intelligence worked everything out in advance. Then, the vision was transferred (by whom? Might it have been Odo?)  into drawings on linen, which was then stitched by the needles of many, many anonymous embroiderers on to its écru background. The writer Sarah Bower has written a  novel called THE NEEDLE IN THE BLOOD which is a wonderful imagining of what might have happened and I will have to read it again because I have forgotten the details, though I remember liking it a lot. There is also a book by Carola Hicks called THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY: history of a masterpiece, which I have only just started reading. She seems to propose  a very convincing argument for the role in the creation of the embroidery of Edith Godwinson, widow of King Edward, sister of Harold and friend of King William of Normandy.  I was very glad to read about Edith, and the other highborn women of the time, because what  I felt most strongly as I walked around was that there was  one person behind the whole thing.  One artist, before the many makers came along, who saw the embroidery whole in her head, (and for the moment I've fixed on Edith)  and who could then supervise the putting of this picture on to the linen for others to bring to life. 

It is worth saying that England (and Scotland too. Queen Margaret was also  a very skilled embroiderer) was famous for its embroiderers and stitchers at this period. Then there must have been those who undertook to deal with  the uniformity of the stitching and the colours: medieval continuity girls who saw to it that what Odo was wearing in one scene matched the clothes in another. That Norman hair was cut short at the back and that the English had mustaches, etc. That the horses were the right colour. And those trees....that they were always depicted in similar fashion. Here they are, below in one of the brass plaques I mentioned. They are supremely beautiful. Someone more recently saw them and created a kind of 'brand' for Bayeux, apart from anything else. Gold star to whoever that was...it's a perfect symbol.

So in conclusion, what can I say? I would urge anyone interested to go to Bayeux and see this masterpiece (not so much a work of art - more a Wonder of the World) for themselves. The Museum that contains it has many fascinating accompanying exhibitions and a film to make a visit even more interesting. It's a model of efficiency and comfort and how to display a real treasure.

This is the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame where the embroidery was first unveiled by Odo. It's most beautiful. I would like to have been in the congregation that day.

And this is the entrance to the Museum. A lovely bank of hydrangeas to welcome you if you decide to go. 

The story of the Bayeux Tapestry continues. On our way out, I picked up a handout about The Alderney Bayeux Tapestry finale, which described how Kate Russell of  Alderney oversaw the making of an embroidery of Jan Messent's Finale to the Bayeux tapestry. She organised the whole community to help to do this and there's even a photo of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall having a go at stitching themselves. It's a wonderful idea, I think and a fitting ps to the story.

I could go on at great length. To say I was bowled over is putting it mildly. The other phrase that came into my mind as I looked at it, and imagined that congregation of 1077 seeing it for the first time was: rolling news.  All I can say is: BBC, eat your heart out!

A visit to Ely by Adèle Geras

On September 3rd, a sunny Saturday, we went off to see Ely Cathedral and to take in the other glories of the city: Topping's Bookshop, and the Almonry Restaurant, where we had an idyllic cream tea with good friends in the shadow of one of the most beautiful buildings in the country - maybe even in the world.



I've been fond of Ely Cathedral for a very long time. "Tom's Midnight Garden" by Philippa Pearce is one of my favourite children's books. There's a lot about Ely Cathedral in that and though we didn't manage to climb all those stairs to the top of the tower on this occasion, I intend to do so next time. Also, Ely is the cathedral in the Roth Novels of Andrew Taylor, which I admire enormously. These are called THE FOUR LAST THINGS, THE JUDGEMENT OF STRANGERS and REQUIEM FOR AN ANGEL and I recommend them unreservedly.

We were lucky on the day we went. It happened to be the wedding day of Mark and Joanna, and though part of the nave (choir stalls, etc) was out of bounds, we had the benefit of the organ playing marvellous music, the sun streaming through the doors and lighting up the whole cathedral and hearing Mark and Joanna exchanging their vows, as well as what the presiding clergyman was saying to them about Etheldreda, who founded the Cathedral. The Cathedral website is full of information about its history.



Her story is fascinating. She wasn't actually very sold on marriage. She ran away from her first husband, and the marriage was unconsummated. She took shelter on the Isle of Ely and founded an Abbey. You can read all about her (and it's fascinating!) on the Early British Kingdoms website.

Cathedrals, as well as being grand and imposing buildings, built to glorify God and enthrall and awe a public that couldn't read and didn't have television (I'm not being frivolous here. The stained glass windows are a sort of permanent display of highly-coloured and exciting images and very beautiful they are too) also have small corners where eccentric things can be found. This, in one of the very oldest parts of the building caught my eye:



Something else caught my eye also, and I think is going to be an inspiration for some kind of story. Etheldreda famously embroidered vestments for St Cuthbert of whom she was very fond, and on a wall right by the Cathedral Shop there's this banner, showing the Saint, which is carried in processions:



Anyone who's read my work knows that I'm a sucker for handicrafts of any kind but best of all was this. I'm putting it up even though it's illegible what with the glare and the size of the print but you must take my word for it, that what it says is that the banner was embroidered by MISS YARNS ....yes! Can you credit it? She did the work in Bayswater in 1910 and I'm busy imagining what sort of person she must have been...watch this space.



After leaving the Cathedral and before going for our tea and scones, we visited Topping's of Ely. This bookshop is a treasure house and a model of what a bookshop ought to be. It was founded by Robert Topping (ex-Manchester Waterstone's Deansgate branch)and I'll be returning to it often, I hope. Anyone who's around this area (or in Bath where there's another shop) should definitely drop in.

What struck me, thinking later on about all I'd seen was this: various strands of my own history were woven together here. One of the friends we met for tea I've known since I was 18 years old and that's half a century. The bookshop took me back to my days in Manchester and seeing Robert Jones behind the counter was very nostalgic. Books set in Ely took me back, not only to the places they described but also to where I was when I read them....and so on. Everything seemed linked in very ordinary but still amazing ways and I saw all sorts of connections between things that I'd never seen before.

To finish with, here's a picture of me. This is what I looked like in Ely on a sunny Saturday in September.

A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION by Adèle Geras

This is Hannah Smith’s Casket. I fell in love with it when I first saw it at the Whitworth Art Gallery in 1967 and it’s been on my mind often since then. The casket was made in the 1640s during the English Civil War,(and finished in the 1650s) by a young girl staying in Oxford which was at the time a Royalist stronghold. What struck me most forcibly was not the beauty of the embroidery, the seed pearls and the luminous, pale colours; the allegorical figures and beautifully-worked details, but the fact that Hannah Smith had hidden a message within it.

You know the kind of thing. Who hasn’t, as a child, buried something in a box in the garden in case aliens came and wanted to know about us? It’s the Time Capsule concept, which has now acquired grown-up status. To see Hannah doing the same thing exactly in 1656 was thrilling: one of those moments when you realize that, give or take certain differences to do with stages of development and the passage of time, human beings have always been just what they are now, with the same hopes, desires, needs, and preoccupations no matter when they lived.

Hannah’s message reads: The yere of our Lord being 1657 if ever I have any thoughts about the time when I went to Oxford, as it may be I may, when I have forgotten the time, to satisfi my self, I may look in this paper and find it. I went to Oxford in the yere of 1644 and my being there 2 yeres….and I was almost 12 years of age when I went and made an end of my cabinette at Oxford…and my cabinette was made up in the yere of 1656 at London. I have written this to satisfi my self and those that shall inquir about it. Hannah Smith.

Very soon after I started writing in 1976, I turned to Hannah Smith for inspiration. I wrote an Antelope book for Hamish Hamilton. [Anyone writing for children in the Seventies will remember Antelopes and their younger versions, which were called Gazelles. They were series for young readers published by Hamish Hamilton, and illustrated with line drawings. Antelopes were about 9000 words long; Gazelles about 2000.] My story was set during the English Civil War. In it, Hannah is a young girl staying with a relative in Oxford. She becomes a kind of nurse to a wounded Royalist soldier and of course falls in love with him. It was turned down and never published.

In 1987, I used the same story as the basis for a play, which I entered for a competition run by the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. This fared better and was chosen by Rosalind Knight to be performed at the theatre as a Rehearsed Reading for one night only. I regard that evening as one of the highlights of my career. It was an amazing experience to see my words acted out before me and a measure of how good the cast was that within minutes I’d quite forgotten that this was my play and was caught up with the drama as though it had been written by someone else. It’s never been performed again.

In 1989, Hannah Smith and her casket appeared in a poem sequence called Needleworks. I’ll end with a short quotation from that, but it’s now more than 20 years since the story has cropped up in something I’ve written. Maybe it’s time to turn my mind to Hannah Smith once again.

“The soldier left our house.
I embroidered long weeks:
every thread a vein
every pearl a tear
every stitch a sorrow
every needle a small dagger
drawing blood.

My cabinet holds trinkets:
letters, chains,
locks of hair, and flowers
pressed to memories.

I have written this to satisfy my self
and those that shall inquir about it.
Hannah Smith.