The making of My Sisters Hugged Me To Work

by Becky Moore

The research

A crucial part of producing a piece of art for me is the research stage. Not because I need to include everything I know in the finished piece, but because I need to have a feel for the subject matter. I heard the author Kate Mosse talking about this the other day: you don’t need to describe everything a character is wearing, but if someone asks you what colour socks they have on, you need to know, because it goes to the personality and behaviour of that character. It’s the way I get to produce something authentic, something that feels real.

Often in my work, ‘research’ might be a period of introspection, followed by trying to make sense of all that with a bit of reading and writing down of my thoughts. But this project needed more than that. For a start, the brief was to respond to Gill Crawshaw’s research on disabled textile workers, so we needed to know more about that. And we wanted to get a feel of what a textile mill was like, what working there was like, what life for disabled workers was like. We also wanted to think about what life and work for disabled people is like now, and so we talked a lot about our personal experiences as well as investigating those of others, and the policies and circumstances that serve a double whammy to disabled people in the workplace. I have stitched some of these experiences, historical and contemporary, into the piece.

Of course, this isn’t an academic history paper, and we had to keep reminding ourselves not to dive down too many rabbit holes, however interesting they were. But we needed a feel for it. We needed to know, not what is written in history books by people who weren’t there, but what real textile workers, real people, did, heard, saw, said, felt. So, after reading a lot of contemporary reports, such as the Factories Inquiry Commission of 1833 (1) we took ourselves off to a real mill. Luckily, in Leeds, we have the wonderfully preserved archive at Sunny Bank Mill. Sunny Bank was a working woollen mill till 2008 and the owners have been keen to preserve the mill’s history. The archivist, Rachel Moaby, walked and talked us through the extensive collection of fabric, machinery, pattern books, business records, oral histories, and ephemera. While Becky (Cherriman) delved into the testimonies of those who had worked at the mill, I was most interested in the ephemera. The little incidental things that somehow don’t get thrown out even though they have no obvious use, are the things that I feel link us to our fellow humans. I was very interested in the stationery, and the hand tools, and ledgers, and handwritten dye recipes and so on. They seem somehow to hold on to the spirit of the people who used them, without getting too magical about it. I wanted to include some of those things in the piece, so I took copious photographs.

The one thing that Becky and I both found really interesting, in their structure and pattern, were the peg plans (one of these is pictured above). These are the designs that are marked out on blue squared point paper to plan out how a loom will be set up for the weave pattern in the fabric. We agreed that we would take this as inspiration for both the structure of the poem and the starting point for the textile piece.

I was really concerned that the materials I used reflected the subject matter. I sourced woollen textiles, most of which has been woven in Yorkshire. Although the woollen industry in the UK is very much depleted and almost extinct and most of what we see in clothing is now produced elsewhere in the world, West Yorkshire does still have working woollen mills. Huddersfield is renowned for its high quality fine woollen fabric that goes to make luxury suits and some of this fabric is in the patchwork of the piece, but Leeds also still weaves high class woollen fabric at Hainsworth’s and Abraham Moon. Traditionally though, Leeds’ woollen industry was mostly what is known as shoddy – that is, recycled wool that was spun and woven into quite rough cloth and made into blankets and rough working clothing. Armley Mills was a shoddy mill producing blankets. So, I have added some woollen blanket fabric in the piece too. It should be said that Sunny Bank Mills, owing to its unique water supply, was unusual in the Leeds district for its production of fine quality wool and merino wool cloth.

But the Leeds and West Yorkshire cloth industry wasn’t just about wool. One of the things I found interesting was how the story of the linen mills of West Yorkshire has been neglected. Temple Mill (Temple Works) in Holbeck, Leeds, for instance was a flax (linen) mill. If you are descended from 19th century Irish immigrants to Leeds, there’s a pretty high chance they were linen weavers who came to work in the linen mills here. Irish immigrants played such a huge role in the economic and cultural development of West Yorkshire, and their stories are often hidden, so I wanted to pay homage to that particular side of textile history by including a piece of linen in the piece. In my meandering research and reading, I was directed by a friend to the history of a particular group of Irish linen workers: children who were exported like chattel from a workhouse in Ireland to work for low pay in a West Yorkshire flax mill. Even at the time, the way these children had been trafficked raised eyebrows in high places. But the Irish Workhouses were keen to get rid of their ‘burden’ and West Yorkshire mill owners were more than happy to receive some cheap labour (2). It’s a bonus that I love working with and embroidering on linen, but it’s there for a reason. Those workers need to be remembered as some of the people that built West Yorkshire.

Most of the photography used in the piece is my own, but I do owe great thanks to Armley Mills – for allowing me generous time and access to photograph the machinery and particularly the spinning mule, as well as Sunny Bank Mills Archive, again for access and time to take photographs of their ephemera. I wanted to include a lot of it in the piece, again because it was the day-to-day stuff that textile workers handled. For the photographs of 19th and early 20th century mill workers, I would like to give credit to Sunny Bank Mills Archive, who have generously allowed me to use a couple of their photos in the work. Thankyou also to Nora Kennally, who gave me access to the local history archive of the late Danny and Helen Kennally, and the wonderful photographs of young Irish immigrants from the Bank area of Leeds (pictured above). I unfortunately cannot find the copyright owner of those photographs.

The poetry is entirely Becky (Cherriman)’s work. She will talk more about it in her own blog but I do want to say that I found her use of words and stories very moving. The first time she read it to me I thought of all the testimonies we had read, and I was pretty choked up to be honest. The words and phrases, some Becky’s own, some taken from those testimonies and the terminology and language of Yorkshire mills, sing with the rhythm of factory life. If I’m honest, it scared me a little, wanting to do the poem justice. It has been truly amazing working with Becky. We’ve only known each other a short while but immediately found we had very similar life experiences and outlooks and attitudes. We really wanted to work together – writer and textile artist – and getting this commission for the Any Work That Wanted Doing exhibition was like being handed the best Christmas present. I don’t usually work collaboratively, especially with artists of a completely different art form, but it has been a fantastic experience. I’d like to do more.

The Make

There are some of you who may be interested in the technical aspects of putting a piece like this together, so here goes:

The patchwork: English Paper Piecing method, where paper shapes are cut out of scrap paper and fabric sewn onto them. Then each piece stitched to other pieces, then the paper removed. I stitched some of these the ‘wrong’ way round so you can see the structure and method, but also to frame some of the facsimiles of the ephemeral papers I had gathered. The patchwork includes wool, mostly Yorkshire woven (some unknown donations from friends) and printed cotton with images and words. Some of it is waxed to give the feel of oily machine rags.

The linen: Embroidered with the title of the piece, and also the key to the code that is ‘woven’ into the poem. The code is taken from the code books used by mills in telegrams, to avoid revealing trade secrets to competitors.

The threads: I spent a lot of time thinking about what would bring the piece together as a complete work rather than a collage of separate pieces. The English language is peppered with textile related words, phrases and expressions that reflect just how important textiles are in history. We spin stories, and warp facts and stitch up, and cotton on, pull the wool over your eyes…. The threads that run through the story we are telling of course, are ones of hardship, of hard work, of exploitation, danger and injury. But also of camaraderie and solidarity and resistance. The threads, then, represent not only the spun wool and flax and cotton, and warps of woven fabric, but also the hard labour and things that unite those disabled people of the past and us today in our struggle to earn a living without breaking ourselves on the alter of other people’s profit. I could have bought a piece of cord and sewn that on, but it seemed more fitting to painstakingly and laboriously bind and stitch each piece individually. It’s trite to try and reflect all the people, the broken bones, the hearing loss, the deformed skeletons, the early deaths, the emphysema, the long hours, exploitation in a few hours of stitching in front of the telly, but it did give me the opportunity to reflect on what we have gained since the 19thcentury, and what we are always in danger of losing as workers and especially as disabled workers in the world today.

References

(1) Central Board of His Majesty’s Commissioners; Factories Inquiry Commission First Report; House of Commons, 1833.

(2) Helen Kennally, North Tipperary famine orphans “exported” to Yorkshire; Tipperary Historical Journal; 1992 Tipperary Historical Journal ISSN0910655

The making of My Sisters Hugged Me To Work

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