Gansey Nation

As you’ve probably all heard by now, one of the commonest myths associated with ganseys is that the patterns were so unique to families, or villages, that drowned sailors could be identified by them. But could that really be true? Certainly none of the books I’ve read can quote an instance when it actually happened. That doesn’t make it untrue, of course; but it would be nice to have some evidence.

The myth also begs a number of questions. For instance: how many fishermen were actually lost at sea? How many men drowned and weren’t recovered before their features were disfigured unrecognisably? (Some days you get the fish, and some days the fish get you…) How many had ID in their wallets?

The only way to answer those questions is to do a bit of research. For example, if you matched the burial registers for parishes on the coast against coroner’s inquest papers and local newspapers you’d have a pretty clear idea how many unidentified fishermen were recovered from the sea in that area. Certainly you’d expect the newspapers to report a story like a fisherman being identified by his gansey. Has anyone ever checked this? Did it ever happen?

(Incidentally, when I was an archivist working for the Suffolk Record Office in Lowestoft in the 1980s we had a collection of the old “fishing boat agreements”, boxes of the papers that the crew filled in before each voyage (every week or so) dating back to the 19th century (1852-1946 – I just looked it up online). Like a visitor’s book, each crew member would sign their name, age and role on board. These are fantastic documents; and rumour has it that somewhere in the collections is the signature of the young Joseph Conrad when he was working as a sailor, fresh from Poland – though sadly I think this is just another myth as we never found it.)

But I digress. The other two problems I have with this myth are these: firstly, to identify a man from his gansey, you’d need to know all the patterns of all the villages up and down the coast, which was hardly feasible a hundred years ago. And secondly, let’s face it, the patterns were just not that unique. The same pattern, as worn by the celebrated Henry Freeman, crops up in both Cornwall and Whitby in various guises. We know too that the fishing fleets travelled along the coast; there are pictures of the Scottish fleet in Yarmouth, for example. So everyone would have had a pretty good chance to take a good look at everyone else’s gansey patterns; and of course they’d have copied each other. (In fact, several of Gladys Thompson’s interviewees cheerfully admit as much! After all, we do – why not they?)

The thing we have to remember is that we are looking at them at a fixed point, frozen in time; at the time when they were recorded. So we make a note that this pattern is from this village, but that pattern is from that village – because that’s where we first saw them, crucially at a time when the practice was dying out. But I think the situation was far more fluid than that, much looser. (Which is not to say that some families didn’t keep the same patterns for generations, of course.) I can’t imagine asking every village from Whitby to Cornwall if they’ve lost a fisherman recently – it doesn’t seem very tactful, somehow.

Still, best not to lean too far over the side of the boat, eh? I mean, just to be on the safe side…

Right, yes, well, the cuff, also known as the sleeve’s draft-excluder.

First of all, the technical stuff. After decreasing down the sleeve by 2 stitches in every 5 rows after the gusset, I ended up with 118 stitches round the wrist. The rule of thumb is to decrease by 1 in 10 into the cuff, which I’ve found usually seems to work OK. My suggestion is that it looks better if you can arrange to decrease on the purl stitches: i.e., knit 2/purl-2-&-decrease. That way you get nice unbroken columns of knit stitches from the sleeve to form the cuff ribs.

The other thing to bear in mind, of course, is that you have to end up with a multiple of 4 (so you end up with an even spread of k2/p2 ribs). So in this case I decreased by 10 stitches to leave me with 108, or 9 ribs of 4 stitches on each of three needles I’m knitting on, which is very neat. Now it’s just been a question of staying sane while knitting a long tubular cuff, probably about 6 inches in all, so it can be rolled back to suit the arm-length of whoever ends up wearing it.

Oh yes, and some books insist that the fake seam stitch should continue down the cuffs independently of the ribbing pattern (the same books say the same thing about the body seams in relation to the ribbing too). Well, nuts to that I say! It may or may not be authentic (whatever that means), but I much prefer the seam to disappear and merge into the purl stitches of the cuff – I just think it looks better that way, and besides, the seam is a fake, after all.

I promised last week to return to the matter of just how waterproof is a gansey. Now, I’m really not convinced. Certainly the ones I knit aren’t exactly waterproof (as exhaustive trials with a bathtub, a bucket and several unwitting volunteers have shown), but that proves nothing, as I dare say mine aren’t knitted in a properly authentic way. But I think they’re tight enough to keep out a light sea spray, or drizzle; and I can’t help thinking that’s what people mean when they say that ganseys are good at repelling water.

As the knitting bishop, Richard Rutt, points out in his book “A History of Hand Knitting” (more of which anon), fishermen usually wear oilskins and waders in high seas and heavy rain; and old photographs show us that trawlermen were no exception. After all, one of the reasons why so many ganseys were left plain until the yoke was because the fishermen wore those great big waders (like clown trousers) that came up to their rib cages and were held in place over the shoulders with braces (which were often knitted, and not made of elastic, so the waders were unlikely to bounce up and down like clown trousers normally do); so it’s not exactly as if they were unprotected from the elements.

Let’s just say the jury’s out on this one. Next week – were drowned fishermen really identified by the patterns on their ganseys?

It’s a little-known fact that parts of the West Country still preserve their traditional rural customs, and not only have the radical changes of the 20th and 21st centuries passed them by, but even the 19th century is seen as unduly modern – so much so, in fact, that this is the only part of the world where the novels of Thomas Hardy are seen, not as quaint relics of a bye-gone age, but rather as cutting-edge social commentary.

It comes as no surprise, then, while hiking across the barren heath land of Dartmoor, to come across itinerant gansey-wool merchants on their way to the great gansey wool fairs at Exeter or Barnstaple. They’re easy to spot once you know what to look for: the great baskets of wool-skeins on their backs, so large that from a distance they look like a man giving an armchair a piggy-back ride, and a set of 2.25mm double-pointed knitting needles in their hair, which is done up in a bun like a geisha who’s had an accident with a model helicopter.

They’re a less common sight than in former days; for the farmers took against them after some of the more unscrupulous pedlars took to following sheep about the fields in Spring with wool clippers, hastily clipping tufts from their backs before the dogs came after them, and then passing the wool through the hedge to their accomplices (which is, of course, why receivers of stolen goods are known as “fences”, and why you see so many strands of stray wool on hedgerows in early Spring). So unpopular did they become that country folk refused to wear garments made from their wool, and that’s why you only see pictures of fishermen wearing ganseys.

All of which goes some way to explain why, after buying the wool for this pullover from one such itinerant gansey-wool merchant whom I met late one evening in the tap room of the Pig and Poke, and fell into an absinthe drinking competition with (the pedlar’s drink of choice), I’ve just discovered that it comes from two separate dye lots… But how was I to know a one-armed, dirty, shabby stranger I’d just met in a pub, with an eye-patch, teeth like a piano keyboard and a bag marked “swag” was not to be trusted?

So there we are. A gansey made out of wool from 3 separate dye lots, which is something of a first for me. And hopefully a last as well! (D’oh!)