Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  Over the following weeks, the group snip, shape, pin, tack and sew. They become more companionable, if not talkative. When the curtains are finally unveiled to the clapping admiration of staff and visitors, the men allow a group photograph to be taken: a tiny moment of shy success, no great show. The curtains are modest adornments. Yet they express, in their softness and muted tones, the tenderness in the hearts of fragile men.

  John Craske was a third-generation fisherman, catching crabs and cod with his brothers in the coastal seas of north Norfolk. When the fishing industry declined, he moved with his parents further inland and worked in the family fishmongers, gutting and dressing the catch of the day and selling fish from a little shop and cart. He married and at the start of the First World War he tried to enlist, but was rejected due to an unnamed illness. In 1917, when the search for recruits became more desperate, he was called to the front. But his war only lasted a month: he caught influenza, which developed into a brain abscess. He was hospitalised, briefly moved to a lunatic asylum and, after a year, sent back home incapacitated to his wife, Laura, prone to bouts of stupor and prey to episodes of amnesia. At first there were some periods of respite. He and Laura rented a cottage, borrowed a boat and explored the waters around their home. He began to paint, and for a while it was peaceable enough: sailing with Laura, painting, making toy boats to sell. He captured the sea he knew so well in thick waves of oil paint and the wash of watercolours – furious, beguiling, tranquil, restless. But his illness weakened him further. He and Laura could no longer go sailing and John could barely leave the house. So he brought the exterior world into their home, painting the seascapes he held in his imagination and kept in his memory on any surface available – doors, chairs, the mantelpiece – until paper and household surfaces ran out.

  As John Craske became increasingly bed-ridden and he couldn’t paint lying down, Laura offered him a piece of calico she’d got to wrap a Christmas pudding for boiling and taught him some rudimentary embroidery stitches. Through sewing, he found his way back to the sea. He discovered that cloth and thread allowed him to create the texture of the softness of sand dunes and the fray of water even more tangibly than paint. He devised his own way of stitching, digging his needle in and out of the cloth’s surface to cluster a tight blue of sky, and letting it loosen along a tangle of waves. Through embroidery, the sea water he loved could run through his fingers.

  He stitched the thick of its storms and the bob of its boats, the curve of shoreline and the lace of sea spray. In thread, he could trap the rhythm of lapping waves, evoke the rustle of water at a shore edge and the fading smooth of a distant horizon. His sewing held the comfort of exploration, a reunion with the tactility of a watered land he understood, which could be transported to the confines of his room to soothe his heart and settle his mind. And so he kept it close, running his fingers over the swell of its waves, feeling out the direction of its currents. His biographer, Julia Blackburn, has written movingly of Craske’s empathy with the sea, of how its loss was almost unbearable. Her book, John Craske: Threads of a Delicate Life, mirrors her own loss when her husband died while she was researching the book, a journey he had shared with her for a while. My understanding of Craske is caught up in the threads of her emotions, in an ache of absence.

  Near the end of his life he began work on his most ambitious embroidery: The Evacuation of Dunkirk. It is a panorama of war pandemonium: bursting bombs fountaining the sea, burning planes belching dark smoke into the clouds, a ragged armada of boats fringing the water’s edge, and in and around them the dead, the wounded, men half-submerged as they reach for rescue, others already clambering onto the safety of a ship, phalanxes of men walled on the shoreline awaiting evacuation. Above and around them lies the sky, the sea, the shore. They are impassive and timeless, dwarfing the human scrabble for survival.

  John Craske put all he knew about the world that lay beyond his reach but stayed settled in his mind into his Evacuation of Dunkirk: the world of the sea and the men who travelled upon it, fought in its waters, risked its temper and relied on its power to lead them home. It was his war effort. He died with only a tiny patch of blue sky left unfinished.

  In the nineteenth century, three different women, confined like John Craske by mental illness, made their voices heard through their embroidery. In the 1830s a seventeen-year-old nursery maid, Elizabeth Parker, sat hunched, day by day, night after night, over a rectangle of cream linen less than three foot in width and length. In red thread, with meticulous care, she stitched her story:

  As I cannot write I put this down simply and freely as I might speak to a person whose intimacy and tenderness I can fully entrust myself and who I know will bear with all my weaknesses.

  Each letter was sewn in exacting cross-stitch: sixteen stitches for a lower case c, twenty for an m: tedious, punishing, eye-damaging needlework.

  She wrote of her childhood, the piety of her parents, of her wilful departure from home when she was only thirteen to take up an independent life in service. She told of the cruelty of her employers, of her attempted suicide and of her rescue by a local doctor who advised her to atone for her wish for death and put her trust in God. It is a litany of sorrow and regret, its vocabulary relentlessly bleak: wickedness, sin, evil, forgiveness, disobedience, vanity, temptation.

  Why she chose to testify to her mental and spiritual anguish in laborious stitches is puzzling. Elizabeth Parker was literate, if not literary, and she could have written her life story down in pen. Perhaps she was afraid her writing would be discovered but more confident that sewing would be overlooked; perhaps she thought that her cloth would persist, that through sewing her autobiography would persevere. I transcribed her words, trying to imagine the toil of her stitching each separate letter in such minute precision. As I wrote them down, I realised that Elizabeth Parker’s needlework was as an act of contrition, her penance, her chosen route to salvation. Her confession ends abruptly with a final plea to God: ‘I returned to thee O God because I have nowhere else to go how can such repentance as mine be sincere what will become of my soul’. Happily, she lived to the ripe old age of seventy-six and became a schoolteacher. Her sewing, it seems, brought her the redemption she sought.

  Born in 1844, Agnes Richter came from Dresden in Germany, although she spent part of her life in America. By 1888 she had returned to Germany, where she earned her living as a seamstress. But just five years later, at the age of forty-nine, she was admitted to Dresden’s City Lunatic Asylum. She was sectioned by a Dr Hirschberg who reported that, after causing public disturbance that required police intervention, Agnes was found to be mentally unstable, which was manifested by a persecution complex. She believed that people were trying to steal her money and endanger her life. Despite the asylum doctors’ assessment of her as clear minded and credible, Agnes remained in the asylum for a further two years, during which time her mental state worsened, although it appears she was rarely aggressive. In 1895 she was transferred to another asylum, the Hubertusberg Psychiatric Institution near Dresden, and a district judge was appointed as her legal guardian.

  At Hubertusberg Agnes’ behaviour degenerated. She became disruptive, given to rants, until she was no longer intelligible or capable of normal conversation. It was there that she took up a needle and thread and began to embroider text on the grey green linen of her regulation asylum jacket, re-fashioned to her own shape. Using different coloured thread and an antiquated German cursive script, she furiously stitched outrage in overlapping words, jagged letters, repeated assertions of self, Ich (I) sewn over and over again: emphatic avowals of existence. While historians and paleographers have attempted to read Agnes’ text, it remains largely indecipherable, mysterious even. It is not set out in neat lines but rather words, phrases and sentences are crowded together at odd angles across the cloth, strewn haphazardly like random snatches of thought. They do not seem to have been written as messages to others, but as a protective second skin for Agnes herself: words as magical
agents in a mnemonic code, an incantation of sorts.

  While some of her text is stitched on the outer surface of the jacket, more is hidden inside. Over time, this secret script has worn away, letters broken by the fray of thread and obliterated by the rub of her body and her stains of sweat. The jacket itself became even more moulded to her shape through her wear of it and has preserved it, ghost-like, through the centuries following her death, still carrying the multiple perforations of her jabbing, stabbing, furious needle.

  In her book Agnes’s Jacket, the psychiatrist Gail A. Hornstein explores how such manifestations of madness, which appear chaotic, might be a different kind of language, a visual one used to capture the actual experience of mental fragmentation. While the precise meaning of Agnes’s text might be lost to us, the articulation of her disturbance is undeniable. There is something else which is curious: the buttonholes of her jacket are neat, their stitches even and the seaming and pattern cutting skills required to fashion such an elegant garment from asylum uniforms is testament to her ability as a seamstress, and yet she chose to sew her text in letters that are crooked, irregular, roughly sewn. Did she ever intend her words to be read, or was she using the distortion of her stitchery as a way of expressing her mental state, to represent it visually?

  Agnes died in 1918. The asylum kept her jacket and the anonymous note pinned to it, which read: ‘memories of her life in the seams of every piece of washing and clothing.’ It is possible that her jacket was just one of many other garments. This one survived to end up in the care of Hans Prinzhorn in the 1920s, an art historian and the director of a psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg who took a special interest in creative forms of expression by those suffering from mental illness. Among his collection of over 5,000 artefacts, Agnes’s jacket has become one of his most studied acquisitions: the contrast between the fine stitchery of its construction and the wanton waywardness of her sewn text makes it a conundrum, which perhaps was her intention all along.

  The same year that Agnes was sectioned in Germany, another older woman, Lorina Bulwer, was locked away in Great Yarmouth’s workhouse by her brother when their mother died. At fifty-five years of age, she was destined to play out the rest of her life among another 500 unfortunates. Like Agnes, Lorina felt her fate was unjust. But Lorina’s testimony was a comprehensible, if tangled, narrative. Stitched on long stretches of coloured fabric, some as long as fourteen feet, she composed lengthy epistles of accusation in large, emphatic capital letters that documented abuse and injustice:

  I HAVE WASTED TEN YEARS IN THS DAMNATION HELL TRAMP DEN OF OLD WOMEN OLD BAGS.

  Her thoughts and anecdotes are linked only by the thread that loops them together. Thought to be the ravings of a lunatic mind, it is only recently that curators and genealogists have turned to local history records, medical archives and census reports to see if there is any factual genesis to her complaints, and they discovered that much of what Lorina relates does refer to real people and actual events. What was thought to be the nonsense ravings of an unstable mind has been revealed as an eclectic autobiography. The boldness of her colours and the scale of her lettering, the extreme form of her needlework – in stark contrast to the delicate stitchery of her day – was a desperate attempt to gain attention, a plea for help writ large. This was no random choice but like Agnes’s purposeful. Lorina made her sewing aggressively eye-catching to convey her palpable anguish and anger at her abandonment.

  These three examples give us an insight into how needlework can be used against itself, how women who understand the sewing conventions of their age can purposefully subvert its form to evoke and exorcise powerful emotions. Their sewing wasn’t done as a form of temporary release from frustration, nor did it represent momentary outbursts. Instead, these women spent hours, days, weeks and months on their alternative texts. Elizabeth Parker used a sampler, a form more often used to extol moral virtue, as a medium through which she could confess her moral failings; Agnes Richter deliberately made a muddle of unevenly stitched words to articulate, and perhaps exorcise, her mental illness; Lorina Bulwer created a deliberately bold-coloured backdrop on which to embroider her vehement declarations to ensure they would be noticed and she would be heard. These women were all fragile in their way but, through sewing, they found a way to register their strength of feeling. Fragility was clearly visible in some of the men who returned home from the carnage of the First World War: a leg amputated, a face distorted, eyes blanked by blindness. In others, the shell-shocked and traumatised, the scars of war were less overt, but nonetheless present. They had been left with an inability to concentrate, a lack of co-ordination, sudden attacks of the tremors. These casualties of war had lost their hold on the life they had left. Now disabled, unable to resume their trade, or even find less demanding work, they were doomed to a life without purpose, without social or economic value. They were isolated, marooned in makeshift hospital wards or imprisoned in their own homes.

  Their exposure to new forms of warfare like mustard gas, whizz-bangs and mortar attacks left wounds that could not readily be fixed by a surgeon’s knife or an extended period of rest. There had to be a new approach to healing, one that provided psychological support as well as physical repair. Occupational therapy was born.

  Handicrafts played a major role in therapeutic post-war rehabilitation. Through a coalition of government, voluntary and medical authorities, artists and craft workers were recruited to organise projects, workshops, exhibitions and commissions to ensure that ex-servicemen not only had access to continued camaraderie but were also reconnected to the world outside of hospital and home. Mastering craft skills boosted self-esteem and confidence in new abilities, but also had other physical benefits: the exercise of wasted muscles, the practice of hand-eye coordination, the steadying of hands and minds. Among the crafts on offer, sewing seemed the least likely candidate for male recuperation, yet it was embroidery that became the absorbing occupation for thousands of ex-servicemen, affording them not just the satisfaction of skilled accomplishment, but also a means to boost self-worth and earn a little income.

  Needlework commissions were a way for the wealthy, the titled and the church to play a part in the support of war-wounded veterans. St Paul’s Cathedral in London commissioned over 130 ex-servicemen to sew an altar cloth for its 1919 Service of Thanksgiving. Billeted in different hospitals, stitched with guidance from staff and volunteers at the Royal School of Needlework, the project generated a new democracy in disability. Privates, gunmen, fusiliers, lance-corporals, sergeants, riflemen, captains and lieutenants worked collectively on the same commission and embroidered something beautiful.

  The altar cloth was thought to have been destroyed in the bombing of the cathedral during the Second World War but, just a few years ago it was rediscovered, restored and put back on display. When I went to see it, I found a gleam of brilliance: the sheen of brocade and silk threads caught in a shaft of light. It seemed worlds away from the rotting, mud-thick ditches of trench warfare. At its centre is a golden chalice, the symbol of sacrifice, framed on either side by intertwining palm fronds to signify martyrdom. The outer panels are embroidered with cascading flowers and leaves in which birds, representing freedom, nestle. To the side, on a lectern, rests a roll call of its sewers. Its preface reads:

  This book contains the names of sailors and soldiers of the British Empire wounded in the Great War of 1914–18; who, while lying in hospital, embroidered an altar frontal for St Paul’s Cathedral in memory of their fallen comrades.

  I wonder what those embroidery sessions between the genteel women of the Royal School of Needlework and the battle-worn men in their hospital wards were like. Did cultures converge in the heartbreak of a shared loss, of comrades, of would-be husbands, of damaged sons, husbands, fathers? And did the men, already grappling with disability, anxious about their future, see sewing as a further emasculation? Or did they enjoy the diversion of the female company of the women who taught them, and find absorption in the intric
ate skill of embroidery? A similar sewing project was reported at the time in Kensington’s St Mary Abbots’ church circular:

  . . . with what ease the soldiers learn to do the work, and although some are better than others there seem to be no failures, for every man who has the desire to work shows wonderful skill and aptitude; and those who have been employed previously on the roughest work, such as bricklaying and plumbing are amongst the best at the finest silk work. They are all totally disabled men who are unable to leave their home to work, and they are constantly expressing the great pleasure it gives them to have this employment, which can be carried on so easily at home, and which they find absorbs their whole interest and makes the weary hours of sitting still pass so quickly.

  What did the minds of these soldiers dwell on as they fingered the slide of their rainbow threads, as they coaxed a silken rose into full bloom under their hands? Did they discover mental and physical salve in the delicate demands of a needle and the pull of thread? During and after the war, embroidery proved to be therapeutic for disabled soldiers on many different levels. Physically relaxing and mentally soothing, it also offered sensory respite in the smooth feel of beautiful cloth as a welcome contrast to the filth of war, the roughness of khaki and the cold steel of guns.

  One of the men to return from the horrors of the Great War was the actor Ernest Thesiger, best remembered for his sinister portrayal of the maniacal Dr Septimus Pretorius in James Whale’s 1935 classic Bride of Frankenstein. In the scene in which the doctor promises the monster a bride, Thesiger’s skeletal fingers idly fondle a luxuriant cigar. But his hands were celebrated for more than play-acting, for Ernest Thesiger was an embroiderer of repute.

  I first came across him when I was researching the use of sewing in post-war rehabilitation. Key among the many needlework projects devised to keep ex-servicemen occupied was The Disabled Soldiers’ Embroidery Industry. Its blue oval trademark bore the legend Made by the Totally Disabled, 42 Edbury St., London. In the little I could discover about the organisation, Thesiger’s name was mentioned as its Honorary Secretary Cross-Stitch. That title alone begged further investigation. With a little foraging, I found out that Thesiger’s papers were safeguarded in the British Theatre Archive in Bristol. An email later and I had arranged to see them.