Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  It was the colours of the WPSU – green, white and violet – that dominated the banners at Greenham Common during the 1980s. Women had set up a peace camp there in 1981 to campaign against the deployment of nuclear weapons at its RAF base. While male visitors were welcomed during the day, the camp itself and its activities were exclusively and determinedly female to give a greater emphasis to the political engagement of women in the peace process. Coinciding with the rise of feminism, the women-only dictum was a conscious strategy to ensure that public and media attention was on women’s action, undiluted by male interference or limelight. I went there in 1983, responding to a call for women throughout the country to come and link arms to encircle the four-mile perimeter fence. Thousands were needed.

  I stepped onto the bus going to Greenham in the early morning and fell into the warmth of women, loud in companionship. Songs and slogans rolled out until the air was thick with the sound of us:

  Carry Greenham home, yes, nearer home and far away, Carry Greenham home.

  Singing voices rising higher, weave a dove into the wire In our hearts a blazing fire, bring the message home.

  When the bus arrived at the camp we fell silent. Tiny tents flapped with a fray of rainbow pennants. Despite their flutter and colour, the women’s encampment was grim: stoical, wind-blown protest tethered to a barren wasteland, frontiered in barbed wire. We clambered off the bus and I wandered disorientated, dazed by the throng of women, unsure of what to do or how to join in.

  Some women were sitting on the ground tearing up old clothes, knotting the rags of them onto the fence in the shape of birds, trees of life, rainbows, the woman’s symbol, woven as high as the wire reached. Others were attaching baby clothes, dresses, jeans. This was a personal world transported to a public stage: home furnishings and clothes appropriated as political protest. The women at Greenham repurposed textiles to highlight the domestic world they had responsibility for, the homes they had left. It strengthened the emotional pull of their protest. In the same way that the suffragettes had used embroidery to signal their femininity, these women deployed the clothes of their children, the sheets from their beds, the tea-towels and dusters of housework to exploit their stereotyped images as wives, mothers and homemakers and redeploy them as the raw materials for protest. They transformed the base with a different materiality, masking the solid concrete with the fluidity of banners, punctuating the bleak landscape with small fabric tents, weaving tufts of cloth into the cold wire of the steel fence.

  This generation of women had been taught to sew at school. They were familiar with using materials to create something of their own. They also understood the power of the media and the potency of an arresting image, of the impact of the large scale. They created vast sewn statements, camouflaging the perimeter wire in a continuous length of cloth and parading around it, weaving a giant web to float above the base on helium balloons, decorating the four-mile fence in a fabric petition of individual banners. They used textiles as pages of dissent on which they wrote their messages: Women for Life on Earth, Freedom for Today, Women Say No to War Preparations, Send Maggie on a Cruise.

  Thalia Campbell made the first banner to be carried to Greenham Common. She was one of the women who marched from Wales to set up its women’s camp. On the eight-day trek she made a banner with young people to map out their route, using basic materials: an old sheet, felt tip pens, pea sticks for poles. Thalia’s banner now hangs in the Peace Museum in Bradford, an iconic reminder of a brave campaign, material evidence of a landmark event in women’s political history.

  I first met Thalia in the 1980s when she and her husband, Ian, were touring the country with their exhibition: 100 Years of WomenIs Banners. I remembered her as spirited woman, fizzling with energy and ideas, a chatter of political zeal. I arranged to go and see her again in 2016 at her home in Wales to talk about her banners and the role they played in peoples’ politics through the last three decades. But the Thalia who came to meet me from the train was frazzled, tired, overwrought. Ian, her husband, had been ill. There had been a series of set-backs and recoveries. Both were frustrated by a tiresome lessening of vigour, both were in mourning for the diminution of the life they had loved as political activists. They were the front liners, the ever-present thorns in politicians’ flesh, the sitter-downers at peaceful protests, the rabble-rousing marchers at demonstrations. Now their campaigns were more home-bound.

  Thalia settled me in the sun lounge. It was stuffed with books, piled high with newspapers, forested in trailing plants and comfy with mismatching furniture: a radical’s den. In the first half hour, we seem to have covered the political canvas of the last fifty years but we had scarcely mentioned banners. Eventually we turned to sewing. I asked Thalia why she chose banners as her form of political attack: ‘Because you can fold them up, roll them up in a kit bag, take them wherever you want, send them across the world if you like. They are portable.’ And she sews them because she likes the creative mix of embroidery and appliqué: ‘With appliqué you can shout in big bold words but with embroidery you can whisper, make small suggestions in chain stitch.’

  Her banners are a vivid concoction of emphatic lettering, striking images and small, ironic twists referenced through the fabric she chooses, or lurking in small, sardonic motifs. She wants people not just to see her banners, but to scan them, to catch their double meanings and enjoy the fun. She believes that beauty and humour, side by side, are powerful weapons. They have become her trademark.

  Thalia provides a bridge between the suffragettes and us. She uses the tactility of fabric, her skill in sewing, her understanding of women’s iconography, to bring the suffragettes with her into what she stitches, to bring us back to them. A banner commemorating Hilda Murrell, the anti-nuclear campaigner found dead in suspicious circumstances in 1984, mirrors the structure of the early suffrage heroine banners. By honouring her in a suffragette style Thalia has, through association, added her to the roll call of the heroines in history who the suffragettes carried aloft.

  Another banner offers a more explicit link. Its slogan, WOMEN’S STRUGGLE WON THE VOTE, USE IT FOR DISARMAMENT, is writ large in gold across its surface. It features an apron and a tea towel both inscribed with landmark dates in women’s struggle for equality. In her banners Thalia strives to draw women into campaigns, encouraging them to remember their history, to lure them into action through gendered visual appeals that are familiar, that bear their name.

  Thalia tells a good tale. She attempted to get a section of the Ribbon (the 1985 frieze for peace made in America to wrap around the Pentagon) displayed in the House of Commons. It was a venture fraught with establishment distress. ‘Get this women’s rubbish out of here now’, was heard booming through the corridors as she pinned the panels to the walls. She likes to think her own self-deprecating humour and the intervention of the M.P. Joan Ruddock, helped to charm people. The Ribbon stayed.

  The Ribbon had been an event to mark the 40th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by America in August 1945. It was a US-wide demonstration advocating peace and an end to the arms race and nuclear testing that used fabric panels as political and personal statements. Justine Merritt, a retired school teacher and mother of five, was behind the project. Once her children were grown, she had become involved in organisations concerned with social change and justice. In 1975 she converted to Catholicism and took up needlework, running ‘embroidery memory classes’ where participants sewed small panels depicting what they cherished in life. One night, in her sleep, she dreamed of an angel tied by ribbon to the barrel of a gun. The image stayed with her, and from it evolved the idea ‘to take our fear, our rage, our guilt and thread feeling into our needle and draw the needle through the fabric into an affirmation of life, while praying for peace.’

  She talked with friends and family about her idea of involving people in sewing peace panels that could be stitched together and wrapped around the Pentagon as a silent act of remembrance for th
e victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as an anti-war public protest. She spoke about it at church gatherings and, without any formal organisation or network, the idea began to spread and people started to make panels to a template size of 91cms by 45.5cm.

  Interest grew. A mailing list was set up, and in summer 1982 the first The Ribbon newsletter was distributed to 600 people. People held meetings in their homes and in church halls and displayed completed panels in local museums, and Justine Merritt travelled around America giving talks and generating support. For Justine, her proselytising of the need to create a mass statement against nuclear deployment was a devotional practice. She called herself an ‘itinerant preacher’ and while her message was not overtly religious, she did feel that her faith guided her in her mission. With its strapline ‘Honour the diversity, celebrate the unity’, support for the Ribbon gathered momentum. By 1985, there was a mailing list of 10,000 names and 25,000 panels had been made.

  But why did so many people respond to the invitation to become involved? Why were so many thousands willing to participate, not just as makers but also as volunteer co-ordinators, administrators, event organisers, fund-raisers, workshop hosts and promoters? The Ribbon was the idea of a single woman who lacked any of the resources to see her plan through. But such was its appeal that support came in many different guises.

  As she made her way across America canvassing support, people provided Justine with accommodation, a train fare, an evening meal or a house or hall in which to hold a meeting. Administrative costs were met through donations, many very small, sent by participants or raised through fund-raising events and sales of Ribbon merchandise.

  Participation expanded through the interest, will and energies of people, most of whom were not involved in anti-nuclear activities, but who wanted nevertheless to express their concerns about the threat of nuclear war and the pollution of nuclear waste. While involvement was never designed to be gender specific, a survey undertaken in 1985 discovered that 95 percent of those who responded were women who would not describe themselves as political activists. But they found that the invitation to use their sewing skills for an issue they cared about struck a chord. Sewing was a medium they felt comfortable with. It was non-confrontational, personal, something they could do in the privacy of their own home and it required little expense. For some it seemed a natural extension of America’s needlework tradition of women making quilts for causes, auctioned as fund-raisers for the anti-slavery and temperance movements, sewn as comfort blankets for soldiers during the civil war, signed in stitches as part of political canvassing or gifts of friendship.

  So many people responded that the Washington authorities became alarmed. They said that so many panels joined together could cause a dangerous traffic obstruction and insisted that the panels be carried separately by people walking in single file. But they conceded to two minutes of unity, during which the panels could be tied one to another: just two minutes for all those present to exercise their collective desire for peace.

  On 4 August 1985, 20,000 people arrived in Washington D.C. to take part in the Ribbon. Panels were distributed to people as they arrived. People didn’t necessarily carry their own panel but were given one that someone else had made. This added to the sense of a shared action. The Ribbon didn’t just wrap around the Pentagon. It spread across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, around the Lincoln Memorial, down the Mall, around the Capitol, back up the Mall, back to the Lincoln Memorial and the Pentagon. It was fifteen miles long. When the signal came – the release of hundreds of balloons – people tied their panels together. There were no speeches, no celebrity appearances, no razzmatazz. Instead, the culmination of the Ribbon, as envisaged in Justine Merritt’s dream, was realised in that permitted two minutes as the Pentagon and its surrounding area – the sites of governmental and military power – were enveloped in an alternative unification of human hope, a mass evocation of the preciousness of people, family and the earth.

  In interviews during the lead-up to the Washington event, and in subsequent publications, women told of how they found the process of making a Ribbon panel reflective, how it allowed time to think about the consequences of an escalation in nuclear power. Moreover, they said, working from home meant that their sewing of a panel triggered family discussions on the nuclear question or, if part of a community group, debate on the issue. And some said that making a panel had absorbed some of the anxiety they felt about the nuclear threat. By sewing images of their family and children, of local flora and fauna, they felt they had marked them down and, by doing so, had protected them. One couple made a T-shirt for their small daughter to wear on the day. It read: I’m my parent’s ribbon.’

  The use of fabrics left over from making clothes for family members heightened the emotional investment in the Ribbon’s panels. But there was something else. Many of the sewn panels made use of techniques and patterns that had a deeper resonance for women. Quilters could recognise the meaning behind a specific block pattern. Embroiderers could identify styles of needlework and, by identifying an origin, its historical or ethnic context or even parody, interpret its significance. This intensified the impact of the Ribbon, making the private translatable to a wider public and connecting makers emotionally through what they had sewed.

  The Ribbon attracted scant media attention and had little political impact. President Reagan was reported as having claimed he had not seen it when his helicopter flew over the Pentagon at the very time when thousands of his citizens were engaged in mass peaceful demonstration. But, Justine Merritt attested, political change was never her ambition. She conceived the Ribbon to encourage people to think more about how nuclear weapons affected them on a personal level, and to increase public engagement in the issue.

  Protest in the 1980s was characterised by the assembly of multiple textiles to create demonstrations marked by the duality of a personal act and public action. On one hand, there was the vast scale of assembled textiles, which created an extraordinary image of collective concern; on the other were its individual parts, the personal hand-crafted contributions in the campaign for change. This was the approach used by the women of Greenham Common and the participants of the Ribbon, and it was replicated in many other campaigns of the period. But by the 1990s, sewing skills were less in evidence at political rallies. T-shirts, lapel badges and placards had replaced them.

  Today, however needlework is emerging once again as a form of political protest. The Craftivist Collective whose strapline is ‘changing the world one stitch at a time’ was founded by Sarah Corbett in 2009 and follows in the footsteps of the American craftivist Betsy Greer to offer a beguiling alternative to mass demonstrations and the sometimes bully-boy tactics of harassment by political activists. It devises projects of gentle persuasion – deliberately non-threatening and non-violent – to encourage others to think about and support a variety of causes for a fairer, more caring world. With personally crafted pieces of needlework, and the kindness of needlework gifts, the Craftivist Collective creates visually pleasing and surprising appeals.

  Sarah Corbett’s belief in such tactics was forged when she found her regular email petitioning of her local M.P. to urge her to support a variety of issues met with little response. She decided on a different approach and made her a hand-stitched message on a lilac sprigged handkerchief embroidered with a message about her commitment to social change and the words ‘Don’t blow it’. At her M.P.’s surgery Corbett handed her the handkerchief, nicely wrapped as a present should be. The M.P. was taken aback but appreciative. She realised that Corbett’s emails to her were not just the tokenistic forwarding of online dissent but about issues she cared deeply about, cared enough about to spend time embroidering a different kind of protest, made especially for the M.P. herself. The discussion that followed was more honest, more empathetic on both sides and through the experience Corbett realised that needlework could provide an alternative way to protest, draw public attention to injustice, and engage non-activists in
issues they might otherwise find too overwhelming to confront.

  The tag label on the Craftivist Collective works reads ‘made with courage and care’ and that is the key principle behind their projects. Whether it be tying tiny stitched banners to lampposts to alert passers-by to the iniquity of racism, or organising a shop-drop where messages about ethical manufacture are left in the pockets of shirts in a non-ethical retail chain or making bespoke embroidered handkerchiefs for board members and shareholders of a company not yet committed to the Living Wage, the sewn campaigns of the Craftivist Collective might be quiet and small but they still pack an emotional punch. The sewing itself is less important than the thought and the time it represents. It is the latter that allows campaigners to demonstrate their depth of feeling and commitment. Gifts initiate a connection and they are memorable. They elicit support through being witty, thoughtful, targeted, purposeful and hand-made.

  10

  Loss

  My mother has just died, and a member of the hospital staff slips into the room and begins to quietly discuss arrangements with me, my brother and my two sisters. There are various matters to be settled and we do the best we can. Then she asks: ‘What would you like your mother to wear?’

  We look at each other in confusion. It is a question we have never considered and one to which we have no ready reply. We stumble, grow hesitant and stay silent. ‘What about her grey outfit?’ my elder sister eventually suggests and we nod in relief. At least the question has been answered. ‘Or the green suit’, my other sister reflects, ‘the one she wore for her eightieth birthday?’ We consider the green suit. It was a definite favourite. Yes, maybe the green suit. Other possibilities come to mind. We become distracted by nostalgia as we rummage through a mental inventory of our mother’s wardrobe, reminding each other of this dress or that coat: each a memory of childhood or a special occasion, the family times when we were all together.