Gansey Nation

I gave a talk to the Family History Society last week, looking at what you can find out about people who lived in Victorian Caithness using some of the less common sources. And while I was thinking about how best to showcase the registers of fishing boats with a Wick (WK) registration I had an idea.

Both of the Wick ganseys I’ve knitted have been based on a photograph of Donald Angus’s 1910 prize-winning crew of the Mary and Maggie (WK.29), which appears in both Hetty Munro and Rae Compton’s “They Lived By the Sea” and Michael Pearson’s “Traditional Knitting”.

So I looked the Mary and Maggie up in the register, and this is what I found: the boat was registered in 1899 and one of the joint owners was a Charles Angus of Thurso, whose occupation was fisherman. Now, Angus isn’t a very common name up here, so someone called Charles Angus who was also a fisherman wasn’t hard to find: in fact there was only one, and he lived in Shore Street.

I found his death certificate online, and learned he died in 1927, aged 72. This was interesting, because the register says that the Mary and Maggie’s registration was cancelled in November 1928, with the vessel “a total loss” – so the boat only survived its owner by a year.

But when I looked him up in the 1901 census I found something rather sweet. For the name of his wife was Margaret, which the Scots shorten to Maggie; and his two daughters were called Mary and Maggie. He named the boat after the women in his life, the old softy. Isn’t that great? (Donald, who would skipper the boat in 1910 and win the prize cup, was just 17 in 1901 and still living at home.)

It doesn’t make a lot of difference; but it makes me feel a little closer to the people in that photograph, somehow. One of them, at least, isn’t just a face and a name.

Now, gansey news. As you’ll see, I’ve been making good progress; but there is a problem, which you can see if you look closely at the top couple of diamonds compared with the rest. They look different, don’t they?

You see, after I knitted the Lopi jumper last Christmas, my gansey stitch gauge went all to hell, and ever since I’ve struggled to rein it in. As a result, my last couple of ganseys have bloated and sagged, like a well-fed burgess after a civic function, undoing his trouser buttons with a contented sigh and letting his waist expand like a cottage loaf in the oven. Now I quite like baggy jumpers, so that was fine, but something’s gone wrong with this one. It’s too big, too loose, to the point that the pattern has lost definition.

I put it on a strict diet and exercise regime and deliberately knit the last couple of inches more tightly, and you can see the results for yourselves: the diamond pattern is crisper and clearer, better defined, compared with those that came before.

I’ve tried to persuade myself I can live with it, but I can’t, so I’m going to stop knitting this one and rip it out and start again. It seems drastic, but to be honest it’s a minor nuisance, nothing more. (In fact, if I didn’t have to confess on this blog in front of hundreds of ninja gansey-knitting readers, I’d barely give it a thought – but there’s nothing like a public confession to stop you from getting above yourself, is there?)

There won’t be a blog next week, not because I have to be whipped from one side of the town to the other in punishment for what I’ve done, but because Margaret is away just now (I thought she was just knitting shawls; turns out it was a lace rope ladder to climb down the wall of her turret and escape across the fields) and I’m going to take a break and think about what to do next. See you in a fortnight!

Gansey Nation will return on Monday 1 June.

 

 

Just before ten on Sunday morning the alarm company called to say the intruder alarms were going off at the library, and would I mind frightfully popping round to see what the problem was?

Usually when this happens it’s because a spider has inadvertently crossed the grid of laser beams, or a woodlouse has sneezed and triggered the internal decibel monitor, so I was more annoyed than worried. But when I got there this time the front door was hanging ajar.

Now, it’s never a comfortable feeling to enter a supposedly empty building with an intruder alarm ringing in your ears, and certainly not when you see the door’s been forced open and everyone else in town still seems to be in bed. And while it’s possible the people of Wick are so keen on culture that they’ll break into a library on a Sunday morning to get their hands on it, I wouldn’t bet my life on it.

Well, as it turned out there weren’t any crazed knife-wielding coked-up meth-drinking second-hand book dealers in there; whoever had forced the door had obviously run off when the alarm sounded. (I wasn’t taking any chances, though—I’d got my archivist’s utility belt with me, which is much like Batman’s, except whereas his has grapnels, ninja weapons and ropes, mine has a pencil, an eraser, and a sheet of acid-free paper.)

Now I think of it, this is the first time in what I laughingly think of as my career that I’ve been called out to a genuine break-in; usually it’s false alarms, like one New Year’s Eve in Wales when an air conditioning conduit sprang a leak and pumped out steam so thick it triggered the smoke alarm.

The biggest disaster I ever faced was in Milton Keynes, where the archives were stored in a factory unit. Over the Christmas holidays a water pipe in the kitchen had burst, blasting a hole in the wall and then slowly filling the unit with water. By the time I came back to work the whole building had three inches of water in it, I remember it cascading out over my shoes when I unlocked the door. (This is why good archivists, like we were, always have the bottom shelf a few inches off the floor; and why good archivists, like we weren’t, never store boxes of records on the floor because they’ve run out of space…) Sometimes I wonder if I’d taken an extended holiday whether the water would eventually have emerged out the chimney, or if the building would simply have burst?

In gansey news, I’ve reached the gussets: more proof, if any were needed, that slow and steady, if not actually wins the race, at least finishes the marathon several days after everyone’s gone home. I’m aiming for a long body, over 28 inches, and so I knitted 16 inches from the cast-on before starting the gussets.

Finally this week, I’m delighted to say that the Wick Heritage Museum has accepted the second Wick-patterned gansey I knit as a gift; the other one is already on display, worn by a dummy in rather better shape than yours truly, and this one may join it. I flirted with the idea of knitting a full boat’s crew of ganseys once—but that was typically eight men, and at my advanced time of life I’m only thinking of short-term projects…