Script for Introduction to Season Four

Threads of Survival

Welcome to Haptic and Hue – and this introduction to the new season of Tales of Textiles. This is Season 4 – called Threads of Survival. My name is Jo Andrews and I’m a handweaver interested in what cloth in all its forms tells us about ourselves as human beings. Textiles have an incredible power to talk to us if we can hear them. They comfort and console us, create memories, define who we are and what we might believe in.

I hope these podcasts give us a fresh way of looking at the world – one that allows us to hear what textiles have to say and helps us understand the central role cloth plays in our cultures and how it enables us express our deepest feelings and emotions.

In this new season the tales focus on people who have seen hardship and difficulty, but who have survived and often flourished against the odds. And with the world as it is, the time feels just right to explore stories of different peoples and different threads and textiles that in the face of poverty, intolerance, violence, enslavement, or sometimes just indifference, have shown great resilience, and have survived and often triumphed. And we may believe that this is nothing more than sounds and events from history, but so often it is in the past that the helps us understand the present and how it plays out.

Like all of us I have been horrified these past weeks by the images from Ukraine – in particular one of a little boy hugging his cloth rabbit, sitting in a bus or a train stays with me. How much comfort does that small worn piece of fabric bring him now as he becomes a new refugee? And what memories will it contain for him in future?

In this season we tell the story of the first people to be named refugees. 450 years ago, this year, in 1572, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre began in Paris with the indiscriminate murder of French Protestants. The killing spread all over France and tens of thousands died. It was the beginning of a long period in which French Protestants – called Huguenots – frequently found themselves fleeing France in fear of their lives to The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany. Many of them also made for the ports of the English Channel in the hope of reaching Britain. Their story resonates with so much of what is happening in Europe today and shows us that migrants, even those who are forced to move can forge new successful lives.

They did escape and there are many remarkable family stories about the way in which children were concealed in baskets of fruit or wine barrels. And then there are sort of accurate diary descriptions of how for example, those families, I’m thinking particularly the Perigal family who came from  Dieppe how they managed to cross the English Channel at night. And of course, many of these families had relatives who’d already managed to escape, which obviously encouraged them to aim and achieve this really very difficult journey. And there were established links between many Huguenot merchants in Normandy for example, particularly Rouen, which was effectively the port of Paris with London. So, these trading links were very important in helping Huguenot families to plan their journey effectively.

Jo: It’s very like what’s happening today in a sense of people trying to cross the Channel in small boats. Isn’t it?

Tessa: Very much so. And I mean, I think in the last year, 2021, 25,000, roughly, refugees cross the English Channel in that way, and it is believed that of the some 50,000, probably more Huguenot refugees that made their home in the British Isles from the late 17th century into the early 18th century, 25,000 settled in London, the British metropolis when the total population of London was about 600,000. So, it’s a considerable proportion of the local population,

That’s Tessa Murdoch who, despite her very Scottish surname, is the descendant of Huguenot refugees. These people brought little with them in concrete terms but what they did have was an appetite for hard work and extraordinary knowledge and skill in a variety of crafts, particularly in lace making and silk weaving. Their skills changed the face of fashion and the way homes looked in Britain and across northern Europe, and they then went on to have a significant influence on the events around the world as well. Here’s just one example: America’s hero, Paul Revere – the man whose midnight ride warned the American Colonial army of the approach of British forces, was a goldsmith of Huguenot descent.

At the centre of all the episodes in this new season are fabrics and people that have survived against the odds. Nowhere more so than amongst the poor of London in the 1700s. It was then a crowded disease-ridden city on the verge of industrialisation. Half of all children born in those days died, and amongst the poor the numbers were even higher. Unwanted newborn babies were simply abandoned on the streets, perhaps because their parents lacked the resources to feed them or because their birth was a scandal. In 1739 a philanthropically minded sea captain called Thomas Coram set up the first orphanage on the outskirts of London and once a month mothers could seek admittance for their infants.

Babies were accepted anonymously and given a new identity – but to allow the birth mother at least the theoretical possibility of reclaiming her baby, she left a token with the child when it was registered and often these were textiles. Here’s John Styles, Professor of History and a man who has spent a great deal of time studying the textiles and tokens that were left at the Foundling Hospital.

Now, what unites those three ribbons checks and the printed fabrics is that they’re all textiles that are recognizable by color and by, and that’s what you were looking for for a token. You needed a textile that was gonna be re retrospectively recognizable that a mother five years, six years later, was gonna be able to come back and say, this is my textile. Of course, textiles had one other advantage in this respect, which is that you could like a letter. You could cut them in half. So you could take a length of ribbon and cut it in half, and you’d leave one half, maybe a foot, you know, six inches of ribbon with the, on the, with the hospital who then pinned it to the bill, to the registration document. And you would take away the other half, which you could then keep as your evidence that you had left that child on that date with the hospital. So textiles had an advantage over, over letters and text and paper. And, and actually, I think interestingly very often in the 18th century, that was a very widely held view. Paper is, you know, easily lost, easily burned, easily wetted, you know, 18th-century homes. Weren’t exactly weather fast. A lot of the time. So paper is vulnerable in a way, textiles were not vulnerable. Textiles will survive a lot of bending, folding ripping, you know, experiences that paper would, would suffer with. And so I think textiles to do it with textiles made a lot of sense for both the hospital and the women concerned.

250 years later the textiles left by the mothers in the registration books have lost none of their emotional power, but they are also a rare collection of textiles worn by the poor at that time – rather than garments worn or seen on the rich. And they are studied now for what they tell us about how poor people dressed themselves and what was available to them in the 18^th and early 19^th century, and often the answers are surprising.  And in this season of podcasts that’s a theme will come up repeatedly – how textiles that start with one meaning gain quite another as they age. They begin by being valued for one quality and then as they move into a new era are seen in quite another light. Nowhere is this truer than in the world’s flea markets, where you can pick through the textile survivors of the past to your heart’s content. Here’s Rebecca Devaney, Embroiderer, guide, and expert to all things textile in Paris.

We’ve arrived in the Marche Vernaison which is the oldest flea market in Paris. It started in the 19th century, quite organically. When men called moon fishermen used to bring the spoils of their fishing trips in Paris out here to sell them on the black market. And they used to use fishing rods to steal clothing and other items off washing lines under the light of moonlight or the lovely light of moonlight. So they’d bring them out here. And there was quite a collection of undesirables to be found around here. And the city of San Ouen decided that they didn’t want to have this bad reputation. So they accepted the reality of what was going on. And in here in Marche Vernaison they started to build little kiosks that people could rent or buy eventually. So it developed into quite a community, which we have here today. And this area is also very famous because it’s where Jazz Manouche started. So along with the moon fishermen, you would also find gypsies here and they would play their music in the evenings or the afternoons. And you can still listen to it here. There are jazz sessions in the afternoons, and anyone can pop in. You just have to buy a drink, which isn’t such a bad thing…..

This is the jazz tradition of players like Django Reinhart and others who played in the cafes here, emphasising the flea market’s beginning as a marginal, not quite legal place, to do business. These days the market is busy at weekends with people picking through clothes that might once have been the height of fashion – perhaps a survivor from a French couture house, or working garments made for a tougher age, to last for a lifetime of harvesting, or hand-spun hemp and linen sheets made in eastern France, still not worn out after a hundred years of use. When they began their lives these were things principally of necessity and utility, but with age, they have also become things of value and beauty commanding prices that would astonish their original owners. That transformation is interesting. It also begs the question of what happens to our own cast-offs, can they be re-sold or will they just fester?

And then there are stories of joyful celebration expressed through dress amidst great deprivation. There’s also the tale of lace, a textile that was so desirable people risked their lives for it, smuggling it in secret creeks at the dead of night, it is something that has not only survived but now re-emerged as a new and astonishing art form.

There are some changes to Haptic and Hue for this Season. Episodes will now be uploaded on the first Thursday of every month and will continue throughout the year with a short break in the summer. This is to give us a chance to explore more widely and to research some topics that we don’t know so well. We will also be announcing shortly details of a Haptic and Hue Membership or Community scheme where we are hoping to provide a regular behind-the-scenes look at what we are doing, a travelogue and newsletter, as well as some extra content.

But Haptic and Hue remains me, a handweaver with a microphone, Bill Taylor the editor and producer with a laptop, and you – the fantastically supportive listeners who bring us ideas and support this podcast via Buy Me A Coffee, so that there are no ads and no big production company – just a community of people who believe in the importance of textiles. Thank you for making it possible.

I’ll leave you this time with one of my favourite quotes from Terry Pratchett, the author who hides his brilliance under the cloak of fantasy fiction. This comes from one of his Discworld Novels, Reaper Man.

“In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away. Until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life they say, is only the core of their actual existence.”