hen Vanessa Bell painted her sister, Virginia Woolf, in 1912 she didn’t give her eyes, although she did supply her with knitting needles and what looks like the beginnings of a reddish-pink scarf huddled in her lap. Woolf, it transpires, was far from being the only member of the Bloomsbury group who liked to spend her downtime plaining and purling. Younger brother Adrian had recently taken up the craft and, by the outbreak of war two years later, Lytton Strachey was busy “knitting mufflers for our soldier and sailor lads”, thrilling to the thought of the tender male bodies he might be warming with his busy fingers. As for Woolf’s novels, they are stuffed with women plying their pins. One academic has totted them up, and discovered that in her fictions there are more females who knit than write.
Like all north Atlantic communities, Britain has depended for millennia on wool as a source of warmth and wealth, and Esther Rutter follows this thread by travelling around the sheepier parts of Britain, from Shetland to Guernsey and Norfolk to Monmouth. She is a likable guide with a good eye for a story. The fact, for instance, that when the Romans brought their sparkling Mediterranean hillside sheep to our damp, woody isles, they furnished them with little macs to stop them getting grubby. Or the pleasing symmetry that in 1193 Richard the Lionheart was ransomed from the Holy Roman Emperor largely through the profits from the Cotswold Lion, a Gloucestershire sheep that grew its own magnificently curly mane. Then there’s the way that in 1814 the agricultural writer John Shirreff described Shetland sheep as being particularly “kindly”. Although he was probably referring to the delicate touch of their fleece, it is irresistible to imagine Shirreff being pressed to stay for a cup of tea by a group of hospitable quadrupeds.
As Rutter crisscrosses Britain in search of woolly arcana, she undertakes her own practical research. As a country child in the 90s with a crafty mum, she used to enjoy knitting presents for her friends, including an “oboe warmer” (it was meant to be a scarf but she ran out of time). Now in her 30s, she sets out to revive her old skills and learn new ones. This is antiquarianism with a modern twist. Thanks to the internet, Rutter is able to buy rare heritage yarns online and access practical tutorials in forgotten techniques via YouTube, which acts as a deft-fingered virtual grandmother to a new generation of crafters.
As muscle memory returns old skills to her fingertips, Rutter begins to add observations of her own. The idea, for example, that knitting clothes for oneself – let alone for a loved one – is an unnervingly intimate act. Undertaking to knit a 1950s bikini requires her to measure her body in ways that go far beyond a vague “I’m a big size 10” . What is the length from her crotch to her navel? Which tension of stitch will produce a bandeau top that is firm enough to support her breasts? For the record, Rutter’s woolly two-piece works. When sea-tested in rough Northumberland waves, it neither droops, rides up nor takes in water.
This Golden Fleece is the latest addition to the publishing trend for books in which clever youngish people write about an activity that until recently would have seemed either square or niche – making cakes, or flying hawks. Revisiting activities you enjoyed when you were young is actually a neat way of structuring a piece of popular non-fiction. So, in the case of knitting, Rutter gives us material culture combined with social history, memoir, oral testimony, travel writing and then adds a bit of heft with some light archival work. There’s literary criticism in the mix, too – her broader point about Bloomsbury’s penchant for knitting is that it cuts across our perception of these militant modernists as great chuckers-out of inherited forms and styles. But what also seems to come with the territory of this kind of book is a tendency to overwrite. Her text at times positively sags with the weight of her carefully gathered word hoard: nep and slub, niddy-noddy, and three crimps to the inch.
Even so, she remains good on the textile variations in knitting, the way that local patterns show up even within such apparently fixed practices as Fair Isle, Aran or Guernsey. For instance, a gansey (originally from Guernsey in the Channel Islands) from northerly Scarborough is uniquely marked by a yoke of double moss stitch step-stitched to the shoulders. A few miles up the Yorkshire coast at Whitby, one gansey variation incorporates 199 zigzags to echo the steps that link the harbour to the abbey on the clifftop. Even on Guernsey itself, the atmosphere is that of a knitted tower of Babel. As sailors over the centuries fetched up on the tiny island to repair and restock their kit, they added their favourite stitches to the mix, giving their second skins the touch of both home and away.
Reference- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/13/this-golden-fleece-esther-rutter-review
