biography 2
DITCHLING
I had already visited George Maxwell on Ditchling Common, before the Red Cross experience.
He was the best known loom builder and had his workshop at the Guild of St Joseph and
Dominic, a Catholic community founded by Eric Gill, a well-known sculptor, letter-designer,
writer whose ideas had influenced me earlier. George Maxwell told me about Ethel Mairet
only a mile or so away in Ditchling village.
In response to my letter, born of ignorance, asking if she could advise me on earning a living
from weaving, she asked me to visit. I think she was intrigued that a man wanted to weave and
it was arranged that I should come and be a pupil, her last as it turned out. I had to pretend I
knew how to handle a real loom and throw a shuttle, having only worked on my own atypical
creation. But sitting in a corner and watching others I was able to bluff my way through the first
difficult days. The only piece that I wove there and took home was a sampler for a double-cloth
woolen length.
Her world was completely new to me, a world in which she was then pre-eminent; and her
comment that I was the dullest person she had ever met was well-deserved! I was so ignorant as
to imagine all weavers were like her, so was not as impressed at what I saw as I noticed her visitors
from all over Europe obviously were. Only now do I realise how incredibly lucky I was to spend
those, often stressful. months living at Gospels, receiving much criticism but absorbing some of her
values. I picked up, besides knowledge, many yarn and cloth samples, She only liked plain weave
and double cloth; twill was anathema to her. Quality of yarn, texture and colour were her chief
interests; technique, structure, threadings were unimportant.
Apart from the weavers, I was able to meet other craftsmen and artists in that area. One of them,
Hilary Pepler, a puppet master arranged entertainments in one of which I donned my Arabic cloak
and played recorder, apparently not inconvenienced by a straggling beard.
LONDON
One great advantage of being at Gospels was that it was a place of pilgrimage for all weavers. So I
met many from both UK and Europe. And it was such a visitor, Barbara Sawyer, with whom I next
worked. She had a loom in a garden shed in Putney and I bussed there daily to work, mainly on
her designs for unusual floor coverings, which were bought by young architects.
Barbara was the first weaver I knew who had trained in a proper Textile College (Bradford), but
her aesthetic sense always overcame any excess of technical knowledge. Like Mrs Mairet she loved
plain weave and could produce astonishing effects. She was the first in UK to use stiff wefts like
raffia, rush, split cane across a spaced warp, producing some beautifully simple table mats and
blinds. She taught at Camberwell School of Art, students loving her personal interest and humour.
When weaving on an ancient warp at Bradford, a newspaper warp-spacer fell out. It was
announcing the end of the Boer War! So she said.
HAWKSHEAD, LAKE DISTRICT.
In 1952 I was offered a position as assistant in Alastair Morton's workshop by his house, Croftfoot,
Hawkhead. I knew that part of England fairly well from rock climbing and scrambling holidays. The
thought of both spending months in that wonderful countryside and weaving was overwhelming.
Alastair was the first male weaver I met, apart from Valentine Kilbride the vestment maker at
Ditchling Common; in addition he had strong links with industry as his father had started a
weaving business in Carlisle. These aspects made the year I spent at Croftfoot the most important
in my training. The small workshop was shared by Graham Richardson and myself, each with a
Maxwell loom. Alastair would plan a sample warp, its yarn, and its threading; then leave it to me.
I then could alter treadles, weft colours, thicknesses; do anything I liked. I really enjoyed this; a
journey of discovery, searching for what was inherent in the warp, not realising what a novel way
of running a workshop this was. The long narrow sample would then be scrutinised with almost
palpable concentration, Alastair finally saying, "Weave five yards like this section".
Then Graham and I would warp the loom, both being keen on finding ways of making the
job easier.
The workshop was connected with Morton Sundour Fabrics, Carlisle; all the lengths were assessed
for possible later production on the firm's power looms. But some items , like the single corduroy
rugs, were meant for local selling. It was on such a rug that I first threw a shuttle at Croftfoot.
Later holidaying in London, I made an 8-shaft double-acting dobby sample loom and began
working out other rug structures. This loom had eight keys like a piano; you struck a chord, say,
depressing 1, 3, 4 and 7; then pressed the single foot treadle and those four selected shafts were
lifted AND the others lowered. It was a triumph of Heath Robinsonism, using part of the sound
board of a clavier that Nigel and I had made during the war. I still have it but with a simpler
shaft-lifting device. At a much simpler level, I picked local grasses and wove table mats à la
Barbara Sawyer. I also went to Galashiels for a summer course at the Wool Technical College.
Apart from the weaving side, it was for me an entrée into a new world just to live in such a house.
The furniture, the books, the pictures, the design and textile magazines from all over the world,
the famous visitors, even Cherry's cooking and the horn drinking flasks, were all an education. It
was probably because I wrote from that address that I received the complete run of the incredible
Ciba Review.
In the long radio and TV-less evenings, I made a book for Alison (Alastair's daughter, and now a
third generation weaver, concentrating on linen) It was her 4th birthday so the subject was
childlike, about a pig made miserable by a straight tail who acquires one which curled like a
Alastair seemed to have the perfect balance between technical knowledge and aesthetic sensibility.
He told me things a countermarch loom could do which at first I just did not believe; and his
critical eye, so used to looking at and evaluating, textiles, was something to envy.
I began weaving rugs with block weaves there, thinking like so many others that I had invented
Summer and Winter. There were only two English books on weaving, Luther Hooper's
'Handloom Weaving' and Simpson and Weir's 'The Weaver's Craft' Those two and Black's 'Key
to Weaving' from America were fairly limited when it came to rug techniques.
So it seemed a more or less open field, waiting to be investigated. Therefore when I
left Croftfoot after a highly valuable 12 months, I decided that it was to be rugs which I would
concentrate on in my own workshop.
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