biography 3.

Back in London, I had to find a workshop. I discovered a series, called St Stephen's Workshops, built behind a house in Elthorne Road, N.19. Freeborns, a  removals firm run by three brothers, used the house as an office and the workshops  for furniture storage.

While they cleared out the most accessible of these, I made a large vertical warping mill, with a heck block, using wood that had once been a balcony to my mother's house. It was huge, following the diagrams in Luther Hooper's great book; it has worked unfailingly to date, despite the notice pinned to it - "and there shall be warping and gnashing of teeth"!

While working with Barbara Sawyer, I had bought a second hand George Maxwell four-poster, 8-shaft, double countermarch loom. Erecting it in my little concrete box of a workshop was exciting; it was the first time I saw it assembled. I could see it was obviously a real war-horse of a loom, strong and well-made.

The workshop was a half hour cycle ride from my mother's house near Swiss Cottage. and I had an ex-army folding bike for the journey. I was told when I bought it that it has been intended for use by spies, parachuted into enemy territory disguised as nuns! Luckily the handlebars could easily be swivelled parallel with the frame;  Freeborn's vast removal vans frequently blocked my in- and e-gress, leaving only a narrow passage to squeeze through.

I started immediately making rugs using the wool from Morton Sundour Fabrics, Alastair Mortin's firm in Penrith; and the Summer and Winter weave which by that time I realised I had not invented. They were relatively small, 3 x5 foot; I could make one in two days, so easily three in a week. It was essential that my workshop succeeded and that I sold all I made, so I set the rug price at £4 to a shop, £5 to a private buyer.

I came each morning with a packet of sandwiches, wove till midday, heated water on a Primus stove for coffee, then wove again till about 6.30 p.m. and cycled home. The only heating other than the Primus was a paraffin stove, the type used to stop a greenhouse freezing in winter. If I placed my hands directly on it a faint warmth reluctantly came through; so there was little temptation to do anything except weave vigorously. I fixed a long lever to the on/off switch of a small bashed-up radio so that when sitting at the loom I could lean back and control it with a rug shuttle.

This happened 6 days a week; my no weekend-regime started later,

I was of course completely unknown as a weaver. So I sifted through furniture, house decoration and architecture magazines searching for shops which concentrated on non-traditional handwork. Then the unprofessional hand-written letter to the carpet buyer went out, occasionally followed by a visit. I found I could manoeuvre my bike through London traffic with two rolled up sample rugs strapped to the handle bars. To take more than that meant a bus ride where my bulky parcels were not popular.

There were then very few people weaving rugs, so there was little competition, and none selling at my low prices. But also few shops in London which would consider such objects - Heal's, Liberty's and Primavera were the life-saving exceptions and they are the names on my first three invoices.

Seeking shops outside London, I constructed an immense book with black plywood pages, each carrying a photograph of one design and a long woven strip showing possible colour-ways. The photographs ( I now see how terrible was their quality) were taken at a dubious establishment nearby. Once when collecting my prints, I found elderly men snapping a bikini-clad girl clutching a beach ball... and the owner invited me to peep through a curtain at this daring sight.  The only result of circulating this book to likely shops was a single visit from a slightly drunk representative from the north. He was as astounded by the sparseness of my workplace as later was an agent for hand towels, who wanted to deliver me a weekly supply for my 'staff', offering as an inducement a 'fumed oak storage cabinet'.

Other ways to make myself known included contacting magazines, House and Garden were especially helpful and placed my rugs in publicity photos; joining craft societies, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and the Red Rose Guild yearly shows from then on were showered with my newest designs; being interviewed by local newspapers, "Doctor changes scalpel for shuttle" was a favoured headline and several times brought enquiries from doctors desperate to leave medicine, (but if they visited and on asking where to park their car learnt I only had a bike, they quickly changed their minds); writing for weaving magazines, my first article "Towards Contemporary Hand Weaving" (very Ethel Mairet-influenced) started my association with the Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers Journal that lasted for 25years.

Eventually teaching became a very useful money-earner; one day's salary could keep me for almost a week. But a day-long class at Hammersmith College of Arts and Crafts showed up my lack of conventional art training. What were 'hot 'colours? The first day was testing because of all the equipment I had ordered only drop spindles had arrived. The students were bewildered by six hours of wool spinning in a class described as 'rug weaving'. Luckily at that time 'mature' and young students were mixed; the former were extremely keen and set the pace.

I still have the files of notes I made for their morning talks, mostly on fibres, natural and synthetic. I learnt a great deal reading up for these, consulting my expanding library. Of the first batch of students, two went on to write their own rug weave books.

Below my workshop worked an engineer who serviced and repaired the fleet of Freeborn's removal vans. He was extremely helpful and taught me to handle metal and even trusted me with his tools. When the cloth beam's axle split I tried to insert a metal pipe in its place. (Try disassembling a large 4-poster with no help and minimum displacement of a half-made rug!) On tightening the cloth beam, the securing bolt sheared. So there was another more basic disassembling and a substitution of one of the two back beams as a cloth beam. This surprisingly held and has lasted to this day, standing the constant high tension.

Everything was designed to cut costs to the minimum. My "business" stationery was just plain sheets, rubber-stamped with "PETER COLLINGWOOD RUG WEAVER". All my packing paper came from Freeborns discarded mattress covers - huge multi-layered containers which if unstitched yielded about 8 sheets each of good kraft paper. Yes, crumpled; but unlike Peter Dingley (whose shop in Stratford later sold many of my hangings) I did not iron it before re-using!

My loom I altered in several ways ; adding  a second pawl to the cloth beam's ratchet, making a gate to separate pedals, replacing original shafts with industrial ones, fitting a heavy metal strip under the batten, making the built-in wooden seat more buttock-friendly with a thick slab of rubber (found abandoned in street outside!), bracing the whole frame to one of the walls to prevent any distortion the continual heavy beating might cause.

For yarn storage, I lined one wall with tea chests, (again Freeborns was the source; they used them for packing china when house-moving) giving each a hinged lid with a brass closure toggle.  The pile of finished rugs provided additional seating of varying height as I only had one chair. I bought this from one of the junk-shops I passed every day and was thus able to spot any new bargains. It was kept by a friendly if unworldly man; "Right, that was 15 shillings yesterday... its 10 today". Maybe my usual un-smart appearance in ex-army working clothes made the latter price seem more in my range... and it included free delivery on his son's back!

Barbara Sawyer who taught at Camberwell Art School discovered a commercial horsehair yarn being spun in Lancashire. This began a series of plain weave rugs using  horsehair and wool in variously-spaced pick-and-pick stripes.  The Summer and Winter threading I simplified to the three-end blockweave  again finding later that this was a well-known Swedish technique. This proved the most usable blockweave and came after many experiments with others, some needing 8 shafts and many treadles..

Then I altered Alastair Morton's corduroy weave to make the tufts twice as close together; this was in response to the popularity of the beautiful Scandinavian rya rugs then being exhibited and imported. I also made many floor mats using as weft plaited rush, imported from Holland and obtained in 6 foot high "hanks" alternating this with coir or dyed sisal. The warp was white and khaki cotton, the latter from ex-army stores.

I also wove table mats using various brush fibres as weft across a spaced cotton warp. The fibres included gumati, piassava and ixtle. Some came from a brush-making concern I visited  in London, a frightening semi-dark place with open vats of boiling tar and large unprotected revolving guillotines for chopping fibres.

I somehow heard of Samuel Madox, a loom- and equipment- maker for the Spitalfield silk weavers. He had stayed there when they left London during WW2 to work for Warner Bros in Braintree, Essex. So I decided to visit. When I asked for his whereabouts in Bethnal Green, saying I was interested because I was a weaver, the reaction from local people who had known the weaving trade was disbelief, sometimes laugher, How could anyone possibly choose to be a weaver which to them implied long hours of exhausting work for a pittance?

I found him in a small terrace house on Norton Street, surrounded with tools, equipment for both wood and metal working, ( he had a little smithy in the back) and half-built items. He was obviously very old but keen to talk. He let me have some of his beautifully curved shuttles, a box-wood tapestry beater, a box of extra large metal heddle eyes, a sheath of simple sley hooks, a threading hook. all where possible stamped with his name. ... and his business card. The latter described him as "Maker of hand and power looms", winding machinery, button wheel, slide box, drop box, battens of all descriptions, warping mills shuttles and quills.

A weaving friend I later introduced to him was promised a warping mill but before that was made his daughter wrote of his death. She wondered if I could help her with disposing of his workshop. The Science Museum whom I told of this unique relic of London's craft industries, was sadly not interested.  Not having any spare cash, or at that time a very deep attachment to the past, I did nothing myself; something I have ever after regretted. So everything was lost to some scrap merchant. I sent his daughter my short obituary written for the Weaver's Journal and was pleased when she said it caught him exactly. Much more recently I found a Sarah and Thomas Maddox listed as paupers in the 1881 census of Bethnal Green  Workhouse; maybe Samuel's grand parents.

Most of this time I was living at my mother's house; but for a few months I worked as a sort of au-pair for a film director in Highgate. His wife had advertised for someone to give her two children breakfast and occasionally baby-sit them in exchange for free living space in a very basic garden building.  Strangely of the 6 replies 5 were from men and I was chosen. All went well, myself living mainly on omelettes of various types cooked over a small stove; until at one breakfast the elder child, looking me challengingly in the eye, poured a whole cereal packet onto the floor. I involuntarily gave him a slap and he went crying to his parents still in bed. That was enough to prove to them that I was unsuitable so it was back to my mother's house.

One day  a phone call from Henry Morris altered my life completely. He ("educator extraordinary" as his biographer called him) was starting a scheme to "take art to the people". At Digswell House near the village of Welwyn, about 25 miles from London, he was offering  large studios and flats to craftsmen/artists of his choice and at a very low rent.

On visiting Digswell House I was shown a three room flat and a large workshop which had been a stable. Henry Morris asked me what I wanted in the latter and I said a wood floor was essential (for fastening looms to); so this was laid over the rough stones. Also as much light as possible. Later I discovered that the he had himself paid for the glass panel in the door which I had suggested but not dare insist on.

At that time, Marlene, my first assistant, was working with me; and we made journeys to Welwyn  with paint to whiten all the walls; while I collected more furniture from junk shops for this my first independent home.