Gansey Nation

Well now, imagine our surprise when Margaret opened her March edition of Slipknot, the journal of the Knitting and Crochet Guild, and found a picture of one of my ganseys on page 22 (the one modelled by my friend Gavin, in fact, though it’s the photo where all that can be seen of poor old Gavin’s face is the grey of his beard).

Fame at last, I thought. But no; it’s obscurity again, I’m afraid. The picture has actually been lifted from this website (uncredited, which is a little bit naughty) to illustrate a new gansey project taking place in Scotland, organised by one  Kathryn Logan of the Moray Firth Partnership. The stated aims of the project are to locate, conserve and record old ganseys of the area and their patterns, and to get more local people interested in knitting and in their coastal heritage.

They’re going to hold a four-day “gansey and maritime craft event” at Portsoy near Aberdeen on 2-5 July 2009, which sounds like a lot of fun. There will be gansey master classes, exhibitions and “demos and tips from the World’s fastest knitter (Hazell Tindall from Shetland)”. I’m going to try to get along, thus creating a unique photo opportunity where the world’s fastest knitter meets the world’s slowest…

But as the photos this week show, this is where it all starts to pay off: just doing a row or two each night builds up to an inch or two each week.  So that, almost without my noticing it, my embryonic gansey is about a foot in length – the gussets are perhaps only a couple of weeks away, and it’s almost time to think about working out the pattern.

Another way of measuring progress is in yarn used, and I’ve included a picture here of the cone I’m working from alongside an untouched 500g cone – which looks remarkably fat in comparison!

Finally, the gansey’s big enough to make it worth taking a picture of the fake “seam” stitch from the reverse side, or inside, so you can see how it stands out (or at least you can at the bottom, where the image is in focus). It’s scarcely noticeable from the outside but from the inside it’s better than using a stitch marker.

POSTSCRIPT

Hmm. Not sure what to make of this. Margaret’s found the Moray Firth gansey project’s website, and it looks as if my gansey picture is being used as the main illustration for the project. I wouldn’t mind – in fact if I’m honest I’d be deeply flattered – but I’d rather they’d asked me first, or at least given me the credit!

Now, I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but every now and again I seem to shed some forty of my almost fifty years, and revert to my inner eight-year-old. It happened again recently when I picked up a copy of Thomas Hardy’s early novel “A Pair of Blue Eyes” and discovered that chapter 18 is entitled “He Heard Her Musical Pants”. This has cheered me up through some difficult days recently, and has popped into my mind at odd moments – when I’ve been introduced to the Keeper of the National Archives of Scotland, say – and the thought of what sounds they made has made stuff come out of my nose at the most inappropriate times.

Ah well. You’ll see from this week’s pictures that progress is still slow. I spent most of last week in Edinburgh, right enough, and a fair portion of it was spent in my hotel room, listening to the streets below being dug up in preparation for a new tramway for the city. But I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped, partly because I had homework to do most nights (and how unfair is that?) but also because I was usually just too tired. In fact, some nights it was as much as I could do to slump on the bed and watch the cricket test match between England and the West Indies unfold (5 days and it still ended in a draw – what a great game cricket is!).

This is, once again, the time in the life of a gansey when I run the risk of putting it down and finding several months have elapsed before I take it up again. Of course, writing this blog helps enormously, as I now have an incentive to keep going or look like, to quote someone else I met from the National Archives of Scotland in a different context, a “namby-pamby Southern jessie”. (I’m not exactly sure what that means, but from the context it didn’t sound like something I wanted to be…) But I aim to do at least a row a night at the very least, usually more, and it’s accruing like a stromatolyte pillar in Australia (I’m now thinking in geological timescales, you’ll notice).

The good news is, I’ve found us a flat to rent in Edinburgh. Of course, being close to the centre it costs as much as the gross domestic product of Denmark each month, but that’s a small price to pay for being able to walk to work, I feel. One step forward…

It’s been a hectic week, what with one thing and another (and weather – what’s that all about?), so apologies for the delay in getting this week’s blog up. It’s bad enough having to alternate between the real world and the imaginary one I spend a lot of time in, but when you throw Scotland into the mix it all gets a bit much. I’m creating parallel universes in my head, and that’s bound to muck up the time-line sooner or later.

So I thought I’d devote this week’s blog to something I’ve been saving for a snowy day, namely being rude about the clergy. Well, all right, not the entire clergy – fine body of men and women, on the whole, I expect – but just one: Richard Rutt, former bishop of Leicester, author of “A History of Hand Knitting” originally published by Batsford in 1987.

Now what, I hear you ask, annoys me so much about the bish? Well, for an answer I suggest you pick up a copy of his history and turn to pages 129-134. Here, in a section titled “Fisherman’s Knitting” he turns his episcopal attention to the place of ganseys in the history of knitting. Now, of course, it’s important to bear in mind that he’s writing a history, the first of its kind apparently, so he’s naturally inclined to take an academic approach; but it’s a shame he isn’t more generous to his sources.

How patronising is this? “Some of these books, notably Rae Compton’s The Complete Book of Traditional Guernsey and Jersey Knitting (1985), have shown a sense of history, but only Mary Wright, in Cornish Guernseys and Knitfrocks (1979) has tackled the history of the subject seriously. Like Michael Pearson in various publications that culminated in his Traditional Knitting (1984), all these writers have concentrated on the technique of knitting the fisherman’s jersey and on collecting patterns…” (p.129)

Now, speaking as an historian (author, I’ll have you know, of the best-selling Radnorshire in Old Photographs which briefly topped the best-seller lists for books about, er, Radnorshire in old photographs) if there’s one thing history teaches us, it is that interpretations of history are a matter of fleeting opinion. It’s all a point of view, and every generation comes along and reinterprets what their parents thought was true (remember when the British Empire was regarded as a Good Thing?).

So, for myself, I’m delighted that Gladys Thompson and her successors devoted their time to collecting patterns and not “tackling the history of the subject seriously”. Who cares? Which would you rather have? A history book about a dying art, or an instruction manual on how to recreate it, and renew it? That’s the difference between history and craft, and only a historian like Bishop Rutt would say the history of a craft is more important than the craft itself.

And here’s a challenge for all of us: “Though Gladys Thompson and others already mentioned … have stimulated a limited revival of handknitted jerseys, one rarely sees a garment of the quality worn 50 or 60 years ago…” (p.134). To arms, citizens! (Aux armes, citoyens!) Or to needles at least (“Aux aiguilles a tricoter citoyens!”).

Mind you, the rest of the book’s pretty good…