THE YARNS THAT CONNECT US
INTERWOVEN WITH BRITISH HISTORY ARE TALES OF KNITTING. ESTHER RUTTER SHARES STORIES GLEANED FROM RESEARCHING – AND RECREATING – SOME MUCH- LOVED WOOLLEN GARMENTS
Wool has been worn for millennia on every part of the human body. Coated with lanolin, its fibres are waterproof and absorb odour. Wool draws moisture away from the skin, keeping us warmer and dryer than most synthetic fabrics. For several thousand years, humans have spun the hair from sheep, goats and other animals using spindles and spinning wheels. Once twisted into yarn, wool fibres can be knitted or woven into cloth then draped across the floors, walls and windows of our homes, blocking drafts and damp. Wool cocoons our families, and its thread runs back several thousand years through British history. It’s this thread that I followed as I knitted my way from north to south, east to west.
SOCKS FOR A VIKING
I challenge myself to recreate Britain’s oldest surviving needle-made piece of clothing. Natural fibres rarely survive the ravages of light, oxygen and time, but in the 1970s, 211 Viking-era items were unearthed from beneath the city of York during excavations to build a new shopping centre. Wool, plant fibres and even silk were all found, including one complete woollen item: the ‘Coppergate Sock’. Discovered in the yard of a 10th century wattle building, it had been made by Scandinavian ‘nalbinding’ which, unlike knitting, uses one large-eyed needle to pull lengths of yarn into interlocking loops.
The ‘Coppergate Sock’ is like a little slipper; it has a gently pointed toe and swells to mirror the curve of its first wearer’s foot. Measuring just 26cm long, it shows signs of darning at the base of the heel. Pale reddish-brown, stained by the peaty soil that preserved it, it stops below the ankle. Today it’s displayed at the Jorvik Viking Centre, carefully stuffed, as though its Norse owner had left their foot inside.
I wanted to make a replica Coppergate-style sock, but first I needed a suitable needle. The Norse used broad, flat, wide-eyed needles made of wood or bone. Mine was handmade by my husband, Tom, from a branch lopped from a birch tree in our garden. As long as my forefinger, it’s silk-smooth to the touch, creamy coloured and its broad, wide eye, can carry thick and lofty yarn. As a Viking sock needs Viking yarn, I worked with lightly-spun Icelandic Lopi yarn the colour of barley. Months later, I pull the finished item on my foot. It’s more like a closefitting slipper than a softly-flexible modern sock. The stitches are dense and, though warm, quite stiff. I imagine the Norsemen wearing these as they went about their lives on Coppergate. There is over 1,000 years of Britain’s human history wrapped around my foot.
THE FISHERMAN’S GANSEY
Heavy and dense, these traditional fishermen’s jerseys are tightly knitted to repel water, encasing the wearer in a woolly cocoon from »
“They use patterns discernible not just to the eye but to the fingertip”
neck to waist and wrist. From the Pentland Firth to the Yarmouth Roads, ganseys were the uniform of Britain’s fishing fleet from the early 19th century until the advent of waterproof PVC.
Land enclosure and the Highland Clearances had changed the face of small-scale farming with many displaced communities being forced to relocate to the coast. There, fishing boats tended to be crewed by family groups, much as the old farms had been run with brothers, fathers, uncles, sons and nephews. The men needed warm, waterproof apparel to wear at sea – spinning and working the resulting yarn had long been part of the crofter’s skills and so the ganseys were knitted by the wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and grandmothers of the men who wore them. Usually dark blue, but occasionally grey, cream or even red, they use different stitch patterns – named variously ‘birds’ eyes’, ‘cats’ teeth’ and ‘hailstones’ – to texture the wool, patterns discernible not just to the eye but to the fingertip. While fisherwomen worked their needles outdoors when the weather was fine, more often they knitted in the smoky darkness of their homes. Much of the gansey would have been worked with a minimum of light and these patterns could be knitted in almost total darkness. The result is a dense, tight fabric, which is beautifully warming, ideal for wintry weather.
I do not know any working fishermen and the only person I know who works outdoors every day is my father. At 70, he earns his keep digging, pruning and planting, and can read the clouds and birds to tell the weather. Out in all seasons, a gardener might benefit from a gansey every bit as much as a fisherman. On graph paper, I plot the yoke’s pattern of ‘ridge and furrow’, backed by moss stitch, representing gardens, trees, leaves and apples; Dad is a Suffolk boy with a lifelong love of plants. Monday morning arrives with a bundle of gansey wool, known as ‘seaman’s iron’, ten tightly-packed balls, each weighing 100 grams. An entire kilo of wool. In addition to this kilometre of dense wool, ganseys also demand long needles. Five needles arrive in
a long tube stapled shut, and I unsheathe 40cm of shiny stainless steel ending in a rounded point. These needles could be weapons, their shining tips flashing a warning and, as the weather draws in, I get to grips with knitting a gansey, without injuring myself, my husband, or the sofa. For the sheer time they take, ganseys have always been a labour of love as much as necessity. This one is no different.
A BIKINI OF WOOL
“What are you going to knit from the Borders? Maybe some Y fronts?” my friend jokes, but I am seriously tempted. Barrie, Pringle of Scotland and Lyle & Scott – all Hawick-based knitwear giants – all began life as underwear manufacturers. William Lyle and Walter Scott started producing woollen stockings in 1874; by 1914, company, Lyle & Scott, had grown to be one of the largest firms in Hawick, offering not just stockings but undergarments in every imaginable style. The growth of the leisured middle class in the 19th century saw an
“Knitted swimwear liberated women from the heavy head-to-toe bathing suits”
increased demand for what Field magazine termed garments “allowing participation in any sport where bodily freedom is essential,” and the race was on to offer new underwear to suit modern lives.
Rather than knocking up a pair of knitted knickers, I decide to make another of Hawick’s famous exports: swimwear. One-piece costumes have their roots in knitted ‘combinations’. Worn as both underwear and sportswear, they started to become popular for swimming thanks in large part to the Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman who, in 1907, was arrested on Revere Beach, Boston, for the ‘indecency’ of her fitted one-piece swimming costume. There are raised eyebrows and worried shudders among my family when I announce my intention. Wool’s inevitable sag and droop plays on the mind. But knitted swimwear, with its charm-like ability to stretch, liberated women from the heavy head-to-toe swimming suits made from flannel, serge or ‘stout brown holland’ in which they had previously floundered.
I search for a pattern from a time when knitting swimwear was an ordinary, everyday domestic activity. Hand-knitted swimwear creeps into pattern books from the late 19th century, reaching a peak post-war, when bikinis became fashionable and fabrics were rationed. Written with these privations in mind, my 1949 copy of Practical Knitting Illustrated includes ‘an easy-to-make beach suit for summer days’. And so, I knit a bikini – an ‘itsy bitsy, teenie weenie, yellow polka-dot’– from twists of golden yarn, flecked with cream and buttercup yellow in place of polka dots. After a walk to Northumberland’s Embleton Bay, I strip down to my two-piece before running into the sea. It’s so cold my hands and feet go numb: I can withstand only a minute or two. Walking back to dry land, I keep a firm hand on both the bottoms and the bandeau top in case of slip or sag, but both are tightly anchored to my body. I have made – and swum – in my very own handmade bikini.