by Clare Hunter
It is worked in plain and patterned hexagons clustered into rosettes. The girls’ stitching is unsmoothed by time; you can see difficulty in the clumsy stitches, the fiddle of joining the quilt’s pieces. This is not neat needlework, but the evidence of inexperienced, halting hands gives the quilt an authenticity. It emphasises their determination, generosity and courage. For the making of the quilt was fraught with fear: some girls were too frightened to take part. Discovery of their recycled threads, the cotton sacks or the making of the quilt itself, might have led to reprisals. Despite the dangers and difficulties, seventy-two hexagonal rosettes were cut out and stitched together and, despite the paucity of materials, each girl signed her name in a cobweb-thin stretch of thread.
The quilt, Alan Jeffreys told me, came home with Elizabeth and Jack Ennis. I was momentarily distracted. The friends of John’s parents? Time and worlds conflated. I had come to the museum to explore an experience annexed in history on a far horizon from my own, but its reality was within touching distance: John’s mother stitching her angel and signing her name, Elizabeth Ennis receiving her birthday quilt – people just a friendship away from my own life.
We left the basement and Alan led me to a small study room where he had looked out other textiles made in the Changi POW camp. We put on white gloves and unfolded them gently, tenderly even, one by one. The first was a tray cloth: an embroidered illustration of the arrival of women civilians at Changi. The cloth captures its maker’s first awful view of what was to become home for the next three years: a looming watch tower, armed patrols by the gates, a length of austere cell blocks, a high fence, a stone yard. Curving to the right of the cloth is a straggle of women reaching the camp, some shaded by sun hats, others pushing prams, carrying babies, grasping children’s hands.
It is possibly the only first-hand POW depiction of the women’s arrival at Changi. The woman who sewed it obviously felt that this moment should be documented, to record women’s courage in the face of humiliation, to capture the spirit of those marching women; for it to be remembered, perhaps to remember it herself. Above the prison tower she sewed a speech balloon in which she stitched a snatch from a patriotic song, ‘There’ll always be an England,’ the song the women reputedly sang as they stumbled towards their years of incarceration.
No one knows who sewed it, Alan said. It has no provenance, no signature. It turned up in a jumble sale in Bristol a few years ago, discarded by its maker or her family after her death with little awareness of its historical value. It was only an embroidered tray cloth. It was only women’s work. On its border is registered the place and time of that exodus: ‘Katong – Changi, 9 miles, Singapore 1942, 8th March’. And what tripped me up is the irony of that date: these women were marching to uncertainty on what has now become International Women’s Day. The day, 8 March, was chosen in 1975 to honour the March marches of American and British suffragettes who, in the early years of the twentieth century, campaigned for equality and for enfranchisement.
Alan also showed me cloths threaded in signatures. Sewn autographed cloths, often tablecloths, had been a popular way to raise funds and support for social causes since the nineteenth century. Supporters penned their names, which were later over-sewn in thread, and the cloth auctioned off. But the POWs in Changi had a different motivation. They had no causes to support. Instead they shared a fear of elimination, of the gradual fade of self in a camp where death had become unremarkable, where they were cut off from the outside world. In Changi, there was every possibility that they had been forgotten; that they themselves might forget.
A POW named Mary Thomas collected 126 signatures on a blue cloth. The fourteen-year-old Vilma Stubbs recorded forty-nine in her patriotic rectangle of red, white, and blue. Hilda Lacey gathered 216 and stitched a dangerous and defiant border to document the conditions of camp life: a rice bucket to show the scarcity of food; kiri (the deep bowing required of prisoners to their guards) to illustrate a daily humiliation; a prison cell sewn to arithmetic scale; an emaciated man in a loin cloth digging for nutrition that he would have no right to claim. Most subversive of all was the Japanese flag fluttering from the prison tower, which she entitled The Flag of Tyranny. Discovery of such a cloth would have meant severe punishment and possible execution, but she still stitched out her truth. I noticed on Mary Thomas’s cloth a familiar signature: Marion Williams. It is there again on Hilda Lacey’s sheet and on Vilma Stubbs’ autographed fabric: John’s mother registering her existence again and again, fearful of obliteration, asserting her presence, keeping her sense of self alive.
Alan and I talked about the fate of these textiles: The British Red Cross quilt found in a drawer at the Red Cross headquarters decades after the war because no one had realised its significance; the little tray cloth destined for a jumble sale; Hilda Lacey’s sheet, which came to the Imperial War Museum with no information. If it wasn’t for her signature at its centre, no one would have known who had made it. Memories safeguarded but unvisited, unknown except to those who made them and the women who signed them. Many more have been lost, either disappeared or left behind after liberation, secreted away as new lives were built.
In the written memoirs and diaries of the Changi POWs, none of the women talked about their sewing. Why did they keep it so private? Was it because these remnants of incarceration were too tangible, kindled memories of humiliation and despair too keen? Or was it that, among terrible tales of male hardship, of sickened soldiers trudging hundreds of miles through the jungle to face death-threatening hard labour, that the women thought their stories of sewing would seem frivolous, disrespectful even? Those who later claimed a part in the needlework never explained why they omitted it from their memoirs. It can’t have been forgotten. But in the aftermath of war perhaps it seemed a small, selfish act among such death and disease to stitch flowers, a three-piece suite, your own name on a scrap of cloth.
When I got home I searched the internet for the Australian and Japanese quilts made in Changi, the companions to the British quilt. They are now part of the collection of war embroideries at the Australian War Memorial. I scrolled down and across their squares, and on the Australian quilt I found what I was looking for: Marion Williams, her name stitched along with two others beneath a cluster of pansies. On another square I found Elizabeth Ennis. She had sewn a passenger liner sailing the high seas across the Atlantic Ocean, and beside it she had embroidered her hope: Homeward Bound. There are other Changi embroideries: an astonishing white linen skirt, part-pencilled, part-embroidered, encrusted in sewn text. Its central panel lists the programme of a concert party held on 2 May, 1942: The Changi Stroll, Hilda Barbour and her Hummingbirds, Prison Song. Clustered around it are 400 signatures. There is another signed cloth made by a Mrs Cuthbe and among its signatures I find a familiar autograph: Marion Williams.
The women in Changi prison stitched alone and privately. Their embroidery was not done during a jolly, spirit-reviving sewing bee. In the crush and claustrophobia of the camp, there was little privacy. Sewing allowed a moment of respite, of retreat, some moments in which to revisit individuality.
I told John about his mother’s signatures, copied the photographs I had taken and sent him links to the Australian War Memorial site. Her autographs are strange echoes of a past, known about but unknown: a mother tracked in an unusual way through her youthful embroidery and through the persistent stitching of her name.
Men sewed in the Second World War POW camps too. Patchwork was included in the occupational parcels provided by the War Office to POWs along with food and cigarettes and sports equipment, the parcels they and the Red Cross tried to get through to POWs on a regular basis. Every soldier was already issued with a sewing kit known as a ‘housewife.’ Major Alexis Casdagli ran sewing classes for fellow prisoners in his Dossel-Warburg camp in Germany and unravelled wool from old jumpers to cross-stitch defiance. To his young son, Tony, he sent an embroidered letter enveloped in cotton fabric. On one corner is a butterfly:
&n
bsp; Oflag 1X/AH Germany, January 1944
Dear Tony,
I am so glad you are doing so well at school. I hope you will continue to try your hardest at work and play. It is 1581 days since I saw you last but it will not be long now. Do you remember when I fell down the well? Look after Mummy till I get home again. God bless you, Love from Daddy.
In another of those strange coincidences that life sometimes offers, it turns out that Tony is a neighbour of John’s and on my next visit to London, John arranged for me to meet him. The door opened to a stairwell lined with embroideries, just some of his father’s sewing, Tony explained. Images and patterns partner cross-stitched text. One of the smallest is a bookmark that lists his years of imprisonment: 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, and at the bottom the optimistic: ‘Any day now.’ It was made as a gift for his wife, but it would be another two years before they were reunited.
Gifts of love, markers of time, acts of defiance, poems of yearning, records of daily life: they are all there in Alex Casdagli’s embroideries. He sent them home via Portugal, a neutral country. But according to Tony, his father never talked about the war or the sewing he had done in his POW camp once he was home. Later, Tony took up embroidery himself and would sit with his elderly father, both stitching and not saying much to each other but comfortable with their companionship of needlework.
The Australian corporal Clifford Gatenby wasn’t daunted when his army-issued darning needle became too blunt to use. Instead, he improvised others from old toothbrushes and spectacle frames. Searching for something to do in the long months of captivity in German POW camps, he turned to embroidery. An army blanket became the canvas on which he stitched a sewn medley of his war: regimental badges and embroidered snapshots of Hohenfels, Marburg and Spittal, the prison camps in which he had been held, Spittal with its snow-capped Alps glimpsed beyond a stitched prison wall. He traced his journey of war in thread – Egypt, Bombay, Giza, Palestine and Crete – framed in tight stitches against a background crowded in pattern. In each corner, he embroidered symbols of home: a kangaroo, koala, emu and kookaburra. Among the jostle of his needlework, he sewed a tiny map of Australia. At the top, it was signed with his prison and service numbers and the name of his camp:
1562 OFLAG 111C C A GATENBY CPL. NX17797
When it was finished, every inch of the blanket had been encrusted with his war record and his thoughts of home. It is now on permanent display in the Australian War Memorial, a unique autobiography of one man’s war.
For prisoners of war with few resources, the ability to craft something beautiful from so little demanded not just ingenuity but courage. No wonder these textiles carry such potency. They are triumphs of improvised tools, scavenged materials, achingly slow progress. Yet overcoming obstacles, being resourceful and creative, was life affirming. It held the satisfaction of stubbornness, of a refusal to accept limitations. It brought the small thrill of victory.
One of the most poignant needlework relics of POW stitching is also the simplest: a small white handkerchief embroidered with the signatures of seven girls. It belongs to Jan Ruff-O’Herne, a Dutch Australian who, during the Second World War, was taken from her comfortable home in Java along with her mother and sisters and forced into the privations of hard labour in a POW camp in Indonesia. Despite the hand-to-mouth existence meted out by the Japanese, the family survived for the next two years. But there was worse to come. In February 1944, an inspection was ordered and single girls over the age of seventeen were ordered to step out of the line. They were herded towards a waiting truck. As Jan stumbled forward, a woman thrust into her hands a white handkerchief. Jan and six other girls were transported to an old Dutch colonial house in Semarang. There they were photographed, given Japanese names and brutally raped. Their photographs were exhibited outside, along the veranda. The house was renamed The House of the Seven Seas. It became a brothel, and the girls were forced into sexual slavery as the comfort women for Japanese officers.
The night they arrived, Jan got each of the girls to sign the handkerchief. With needle and thread, she retraced their autographs in different colours and, at the handkerchief’s centre, she sewed the date and the place of their hell: Semarang, Java, 26.2.44. Her captivity in the brothel was the stuff of nightmares. She was repeatedly raped and beaten. When she became pregnant, she was forced to abort the baby. She cut off all her hair in a desperate attempt to repel the sexual abuse, but it only marked her out as a novelty.
After four months, the horror came to an end and Jan was reunited with her family at a camp in Bogen in West Java, with the warning that if she talked of her experiences her family would be killed. She did, however, tell her mother about her ordeal the night she came back. After that, she and her mother never mentioned it again; Jan learned to keep silent. She was liberated in 1945 and, shortly afterwards, met and married a British soldier, returning with him to England before emigrating to Australia.
She held on to the handkerchief. It alone bore witness to her terror. In her book, Fifty Years of Silence, Jan talks about what that handkerchief meant to her:
It has been one of my dearest, most intimate and precious possessions, but also my most hidden: the secret evidence of the crimes done to us. Later in life the handkerchief became almost sacred to me. There were times when I would take it out from wherever I had hidden it, and I would hold it close against my cheek and cry for what it stood for.
In the 1970s Korean women began to campaign for restitution, an apology and compensation from the Japanese government for the suffering they had undergone as comfort women during the Second World War. Of the estimated 200,000 thought to have been abducted, terrorised and forced by the Imperial Japanese Army into sexual slavery, over fifty percent were Korean. Many died from the injuries inflicted on their bodies; others became permanently infertile; more committed suicide and some were executed by Japanese soldiers to ensure their silence. Jan Ruff-O’Herne was asked to give evidence at the International Public Hearing in Tokyo in support of them. For Jan, it meant that her story would become public, that her past would be revealed to her daughters, her family, friends and neighbours. But she went to Tokyo and spoke out. She laid a wreath at the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier as an act of forgiveness. Then she came home to Australia, donated her handkerchief to the Imperial War Museum in Canberra and began a tireless campaign against the sexual violation of women in war, a campaign she continues to this day.
For those held in captivity, the lack of space and privacy, the constant surveillance and a scarcity of resources, curtails not just independence but the means to express an individual self. It is this that is most threatened. For some, sewing, the act of making one’s own mark, stitching a signature or embroidering images of a personal world, is a way of holding onto an elusive individuality and tethering an identity. Its very physicality – the joining of cloth, the creation of texture, the making of something substantial from discarded remnants – is a comforting metaphor for personal growth in the face of an enforced reduction. Elizabeth Fry chose needlework as a redemptive task for female prisoners, not just because of its economic implications, but because in its very nature it was an antidote to powerlessness. It offered creative self-expression. Her motives in selecting needlework as a salve especially suited to a prison environment are still pertinent today.
The social enterprise Fine Cell Work has been organising needlework classes in predominantly men’s prisons since the 1980s, with support from the Royal School of Needlework and volunteers. An online shop, pop-up-shops, exhibitions and charity auctions generate sales, interest and support. Fine Cell Work has been commissioned by major cultural institutions including the Tate Modern, the National Gallery, English Heritage and the V&A; the writer Tracy Chevalier commissioned a quilt; artist Ai Weiwei invited the prisoners to contribute to his exhibition at the Royal Academy; and on a brilliantly conceived replica of the Magna Carta designed by the artist Cornelia Parker, prisoners helped to embroider text stitched by diverse hands: poli
ticians and poets on the same page as the prisoners.
Like the women in Changi, these men sew privately, stitching in their cells and discovering an antidote to boredom, a retreat from the boom and bluster of prison life. Collaborating with artists, curators and other embroiderers brings them into different kinds of conversations and provides social and creative stimulus. Unlike the prisoners and convicts of Fry’s day, the men get paid, which brings not just monetary recompense, but also an acknowledgement of the value of their skill, an appreciation of their artistry. They do not sew the decorous, decorative patchwork of Elizabeth Fry’s reforming textiles, but rather wry and intimate expressions of their reality. A bag has the word ‘SWAG’ writ large across its surface; the V&A commission explores prison life and features embroideries of a caged bird, the interior of a prison cell and the words ‘I will go home’. Through sewing, these men can forge a different identity from that of prisoner, criminal, no-hoper. Fine Cell Work now operates in over thirty-two prisons in England, Scotland and Wales. Hundreds of prisoners take part.
5
Identity
I have come to the Women’s Library in Glasgow, an oasis of women’s experiences and camaraderie in the East End of the city. It is snuggled in a splendid old library and, within its panelled walls and whitewashed galleries, women explore their history and their connections with other women, past and present, through discussions, exhibitions, events and projects.
I am here to see an exhibition called Palestinian Embroidery: Empowering Women, Strengthening Communities, the culmination of a 2016 needlework project organised by the textile designer Claire Anderson that involved women replicating traditional embroidery patterns of Palestine in Fair Isle knitting. It initially seemed to me a strained concoction that somewhat stretched the idea of cultural connection but, up on the wall, the marriage is surprisingly successful. Unless you look closely you could mistake one for the other, but for the texture of the wool, which yields a mistier rendition of the Palestinian original. Today, as part of the project, there is to be a talk by Olivia Mason, a young human geography researcher based at the University of Durham, who is investigating a new kind of travel: experiential tourism.