Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  I ascended a flight of steps and entered a light-filled room. The archivist had already searched for my requests and, within minutes, I was leafing through Thesiger’s hand-written autobiography, Practically True, penned a century ago. It is a tightly worded volume, written in an elegant, flowing hand which is rarely corrected. Here are accounts of his privileged childhood, anecdotes of his time at the Slade School of Art and his early entry into the world of theatre. It spills with the cheer of pre-war carelessness in the social melee of upper-class Britain before its youth were mowed down in the trenches of France.

  In Chapter IV there is a brief mention of sewing:

  To the surprise of many and the horror of some, I have also found great pleasure in needlework, which, after all, is only another way of making pictures. It started when, in France with William Rankin [the Scottish artist], my brother-in-law, we used to buy for a very few francs pieces of seventeenth and eighteenth [century] petit point and gros point. They were often rather dilapidated and so we set about restoring them.

  But, despite avid searching, I could find no reference to The Disabled Soldiers’ Embroidery Industry and scant mention of his involvement in soldiers’ sewing, beyond a couple of nonchalant sentences tucked in among racier stories of stars of stage and screen:

  During the first war I found many hospital cases busy with their needles, but with more skill than taste . . . I took them some of my old bits and encouraged them to reproduce them.

  I next turned to his letters, sent from the front from Rifleman 2456, D Company 9th County of London. First, there is bravado: a good crossing, much marching, high spirits. Then discomfort: torrential rain, long marches, mud. And finally, the reality of the front line: burying the dead; five hours marching with a rifle, spade and ammunition; digging trenches for three hours before a five-hour march back in relentless rain, bullets buzzing all around; mud, more mud. By 12 December he is near tears. By 23 December four of his company lie dead outside the trench while another three lie dead inside, stiff with rigor mortis. As they can’t be moved the surviving soldiers cover them with earth and sit on them.

  In January Thesiger and his company were stationed in a barn when it came under attack. The barn was struck, caved in. His hands take the brunt: fingers broken, distorted, covered in blood. He’s surrounded by the sound of his company in agony with broken limbs and blown-off body parts and he can do nothing to help. He cannot lift off the beams that pin them down, tie a tourniquet or wrap wounds. His hands are useless.

  He says he was convinced that he would never be able to use them again. Thesiger was evacuated to a dressing station and returned home to an honourable discharge. He became Honorary Secretary Cross-Stitch, creating sewing kits for soldiers to follow in their own homes, in their own time – a distraction from pain, his and theirs. He designed small embroideries for them to sew, to earn a little money and to salvage self-respect, and negotiated commissions which won them royal support, including an altar frontal for the private chapel at Buckingham Palace. For him it was a reparation for uselessness.

  I picked up his autobiography again. Surely there must be something more about his involvement with post-war needlework? I turned the pages more intently but found nothing there. Just as I was closing the book, resigned to a fruitless search, some loose hand-written notes fluttered out in front of me:

  Somehow or other the Ministry of Pensions got to hear that I was teaching the disabled how to do needlework and they sent for me to ask whether I thought there was any future in it, as they had many pensioners to whom it was impossible to teach any trade, as they only had will enough to work in short spells. I insisted that if the men were given good designs that in truth their work might be quite saleable . . . But the officials of the Ministry had a firm conviction that it was too effeminate an occupation for men . . . At that time the Friends of the Poor were visiting hospitals and giving men simple bits of work to do . . . They took up the idea with enthusiasm and from that small beginning was started The Disabled Soldiers’ Embroidery Industry

  Thesiger’s autobiography was published in 1927, and twenty years later he wrote another book, Adventures in Embroidery. You can see him turning its pages on YouTube in an old British Pathé film. The background music rises to a crescendo of violins as a cut-glass English accent describes the scene:

  All film fans know Ernest Thesiger, the man who plays sinister parts, usually murderers and madmen. Now meet him in a very different light as an expert embroiderer. Needlework has always been his hobby. He’s written books on it and we take you to his London home to see examples of his work.

  And there is Ernest Thesiger, peering over his spectacles as his long fingers stitch a cluster of grapes on a stretch of canvas. He removes his glasses and looks up, with studied interest, at a row of his own framed floral embroideries. Thesiger, rakish, camp, sardonic, the man who sat with Queen Mary on many an afternoon, both bent over their petit point, as Queen Mary (the actor Simon Callow once told me with relish) tested out her honours list on Ernest, eager for the gossip on sexual predilections: ‘Mr Gielgud?’ she would inquire. ‘As a coot, ma’am, as a coot.’ Rifleman 2456; banner bearer for the Men’s League in the 1909 suffragette mass rally in London; the Fairy Queen at Ivor Novello’s birthday party; Vice Patron of the Embroiderers’ Guild. Ernest Thesiger, O.B.E., unsung hero of war-damaged soldiers.

  We think of embroidery as a confined art. It is true it requires very little space, and can be easily worked within the frame of the human body. Hands, eyes and a lap are all that are required. But that constricted environment can be expansive, a creative portal to other worlds, a way of staying connected: sewing not only as mental and physical comfort, but also a channel for knowledge, imagination and passion.

  I think back to those taciturn, cautious, tender men in Leverndale Hospital, and I know that in the simple act of making those curtains they rediscovered capability and found a release from being incapacitated. They also found a wordless way to communicate through the colours, patterns and shapes they selected. They told of the moments of mist and clarity that formed the weave of their world and its duality. Through the choices they made – angular against round, red against apricot – they expressed, translated, explained their inner and outer selves on café curtains.

  4

  Captivity

  Sewing is unobtrusive. It can be done in company and still allows the stitcher to take part in conversation. It can be done secretly, quickly folded away should the need arise. If necessary, it can be easily hidden. For those in prison – divorced from the people they love, disconnected from their everyday lives – sewing can be a way to maintain a sense of self. And, when writing is censored, sewing can be a covert form of expression, of communication, of independence. Some of the most poignant needlework has been sewn in captivity.

  In Glasgow’s Burrell Collection (the hoard of historical artefacts collected by Scottish shipping merchant William Burrell during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and donated to the city in 1944), there is a small sampler dating from around 1830 and embroidered in blue, red and yellow threads. In its bottom left-hand corner is the solitary figure of a woman, dressed in a sprigged dress and matching bonnet. She is in a prison cell, its barred windows, iron bedstead and wall chains all detailed in tiny cross stitches. To her right is a thistle, which indicates a Scottish provenance, and beside it a peacock, the symbol of love. These motifs and the little self-portrait are dwarfed by a verse sewn in black, which runs across the linen cloth:

  I ENVY NOT VICTORIAS CROWN

  ALL HER GOLD IS VANITY

  I AM HAPPIER IN MY LONELY CELL

  THAN ANY QUEEN ON EARTH CAN BE

  FOR GOLD NOR TREASURE HAVE I NONE

  NO ONE ON EARTH TO CONVERSE WE [WITH]

  BUT I HAVE WHAT IS NOBLER STILL

  THE KING OF QUEENS FOR COMPANY.

  And below it is written: DONE IN EXILE BY I McK.

  No one knows I McK’s story or who she was. Al
l we know of her is this small sampler, which she sewed to leave us evidence of her spirit.

  It is the humanitarian Elizabeth Fry who is credited with first introducing needlework into prisons. When she visited Newgate prison in London in 1813 she was appalled at what she found there. Women and children were crammed together, irrespective of the severity of their crimes. They were imprisoned in degrading conditions with little sunlight or fresh air, dreadful hygiene, a starvation diet and little to occupy them. She founded the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners to campaign not just for improvements in sanitation and overcrowding, but also for the provision of educational opportunities as a foundation for rehabilitation. She introduced what she deemed to be the absorbing, mind-settling activity of sewing. Patchwork was Fry’s chosen technique. It required little space, being worked in small pieces; it was repetitive, which calmed frustrated spirits; and it was also cumulative, allowing the satisfaction of growth, a sensation rarely experienced by prisoners diminished by poverty. Moreover, it allowed women to gain skills in sewing, skills that could lead to respectable employment on release. Her initiative was surprisingly successful and was soon adopted by other women’s prisons elsewhere in the country.

  A century later, women prisoners of war in Singapore also turned to sewing during the Second World War. At the fall of the island to the Japanese in 1942, 130,000 allied troops were forced to surrender. Homes, hospitals, clubs, hotels were appropriated for Japanese use. Tokyo time replaced local time and Singapore itself was renamed Syonan-to. Allied civilians were rounded up and marched through the streets, paraded in front of their former Singaporean employees, the servants who had mixed the cocktails, cooked the meals, nursed the children, tended the gardens. Of the POWs, 500 were women, most of whom had led cushioned, luxurious lives as colonial wives, with tea and croquet on the lawn and aperitifs at sundown: a privileged existence. Now they had lost their palatial homes, their place in society and their husbands, who were being taken to separate POW camps. Under a blazing sun, the women were marched on a nine-mile trek to Changi prison on the city’s outskirts, carrying their babies and holding tight to the hands of their children. The women clutched the contents of their lives in just one small suitcase, all the Japanese would allow them to bring, that and the clothes on their backs.

  Changi prison had been built to house 600 prisoners in peace time. Now, in war, it had to accommodate thousands: by 1944 there were 4,000 POWs. The conditions were dire and dehumanising. Malnutrition, brutality, disease and death became everyday nightmares. The cramped conditions, the lack of privacy and the scarcity of food bred resentment and frustration. But worse than this was living with the uncertainty: not knowing how long their incarceration would last, whether they would survive, when and if they might be reunited with their families. They were separated from their fathers, sons, brothers and husbands, who had been imprisoned in the adjoining camp – so near, yet out of reach.

  One of the women, Ethel Mulvaney, proposed using sewing as a subterfuge to stay in contact with their menfolk. The women would make quilts – one British, one Australian and one Japanese – the last as a decoy to convince the guards that their motives were innocent. The quilts, they would say, were humanitarian gifts to comfort patients in the prison hospital, an act of womanly care for the suffering. Their captors were so convinced that they allowed Ethel Mulvaney to leave the camp under guard once a month to purchase thread from the local market. Not all the women were pleased with the privilege. Some felt that it was squandering sparse resources to buy embroidery threads when food and medicine were so badly needed. But the materials were bought, and the women sewed their quilts.

  Ethel Mulvaney exhorted the women to ‘sew something of themselves’ into their allotted six-inch square. And this they did: on each quilt of sixty-six small squares, each square bore a sewn autograph and a personal image.

  An old friend, John Cumming, told me that his mother was one of these women. In fact, he said, both of his parents were imprisoned in Changi, although they didn’t marry until after the war. They, like many British young people in the inter-war climate of the 1930s, were desperate to escape the doom of unemployment and broaden their horizons away from Britain. John’s father, a doctor, and his mother, a nurse, both from large families, were lured to the Far East by the promise of a good life, worthwhile work, the camaraderie of ex-pats. They found all they had hoped for in Singapore. But the invasion by the Imperial Army of Japan in 1942 brought their life of comfort and plenty to an abrupt end.

  John’s mother was only twenty-nine at the time. With a Japanese invasion looming, the British Government had instructed its civilians to leave and she had secured a place on an evacuation ship. She could have gone home. But at the very last moment, his mother decided to stay, feeling she was of greater use to those left behind. The ship she had been assigned to was torpedoed and all aboard drowned. John’s mother escaped one tragedy only to find herself as part of another, as a prisoner of war in Changi for the next three years.

  I discovered that the quilt she worked on is archived at the headquarters of the British Red Cross in London. I contacted John to tell him and we agreed to go and see it together. I made the arrangements and we met the archive’s curator at reception and followed her down to the basement. There, behind glass, fixed to a wall and preserving a remnant of John’s family history, was the British Changi quilt.

  John and I stood and absorbed the grid of the sixty-six embroidered and autographed squares. For me, there was something disconcerting, almost disappointing, in its prettiness: the pale cream backcloth, the pastel threads, the abundance of stitched flowers. I had not expected such a frivolity of femininity; I had anticipated something darker. But when I looked more closely at the individual squares I realised that the delicacy of the stitches masked an almost unbearable poignancy. Trapped in the squalor on the camp, surrounded by the uncertainty of survival, these women embroidered motifs that symbolised what most sustained them. They stitched patriotism, hope, defiance and love.

  There is a map of Scotland with a ship sailing to its shores; there is a butterfly, the symbol of freedom, and a drawing room tastefully furnished with a blue three-piece suite and matching standard lamp. There are forget-me-nots for remembrance and pansies for thoughts and an idyllic English landscape dotted with grazing sheep and spring-budding trees captioned: ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ reassurances to loved ones, of spirits unbroken, missives of remembrance and reminders of home.

  But John was searching for an angel. He knew that his mother had embroidered an angel. I searched too, scanning anxiously along the rows for his mother’s presence. Just when John became uncertain, momentarily and sadly doubtful that this was the quilt his mother sewed on, he found it: a bluebell-frocked angel with a flutter of wings, clutching a posy of flowers.

  It is girlish, almost whimsical, in pink, baby blue and cream, a confetti concoction of colours chosen in the grimmest of times. At her angel’s feet, stitched in the prettiest of pinks, is his mother’s signature with her maiden name: Marion Williams. There is an immediacy in the freshness of its colours, the crispness of her stitches. It is as if his mother has just that minute put down her needle. It conjures her up at that time, in that place, John’s mother’s girlhood fixed in a six-inch square: innocent, romantic, the girl she was before liberation, before marriage and the birth of a son. It was, for both of us, a revelation, but for John it was also an insight.

  We read aloud the roll call of stitched autographs: ‘Dorothy Tadgell, J. Davidson, E.M. Murphy, M. Love.’ Some names snagged at John’s memory, but faintly; it was too long ago to be certain of any connection. But as we left and said goodbye, his memories stirred to remember reunions, the ‘old crowd’ from Singapore getting together over jolly evenings, much laughter and large whiskies. There was a couple who were particularly close to his parents, Jack and Elizabeth Ennis, and he wondered what happened to them. Elizabeth’s signature wasn’t on the
quilt. For whatever reason, she hadn’t chosen to embroider a square.

  The next day I visited the Imperial War Museum. I had arranged to meet Alan Jeffreys, the museum’s Senior Curator of Social History, who had other examples of POW needlework from Changi to show me. Alan led me to a basement store room where, on another wall, behind another glass, there was another Changi patchwork quilt, this one made by a group of girls aged eight to sixteen. It had been created before the women decided to make their hospital quilts. The girls’ quilt had been their inspiration. Alan told me the story.

  The girls were quartered in Hut 16, designed for thirty-four prisoners but housing a hundred. They took turns to sleep in a bed. They witnessed the fear and hopelessness of adults, the injustice of guards and desperate acts of survival. Their staple diet was rice. One of the women in the camp organised them into a Girl Guide troupe to bring some activity and a little normality into their lives. The girls were grateful. When they learned of her birthday they decided to make her, in secret, a surprise gift as a thank you. They decided on a patchwork quilt, but it was no easy task. They had none of the privileges later afforded to Ethel Mulvaney, so fabric and thread had to be scavenged from scarce belongings, from precious clothing that was already threadbare.

  The girls unpicked thread from clothes that had rotted in the sun. Their patient unstitching took time. They hid purloined rice and flour sacks in the folds of their dresses. They sharpened blunt needles on stone floors with frustratingly little success. And, small piece by small piece, they made the birthday quilt.