COUNTRY LIFE
Country Crafts
We live in an age of vanishing country crafts, and no institution has done more than the Rural Industries Bureau to save such country arts and their exponents from extinction. Yet I still think that the work of this organisation, which is concerned more with craftsmen than with the general public, is not nearly well enough known. This bureau is not a society, and it does not exist for private profit. It is not concerned with the stitching of fancy tea-cosies or with moral poker-work. It is virtually a government department, aided by various grants, and it exists to help encourage and teach the genuine country craftsman whose art is in danger, either from apathy or stupidity, ignorance or competition, of dying out. It has done many admirable and courageous things for country smiths, weavers, wood-turners, wood- carvers, basket-makers and quilters. It has had the temerity to teach country craftsmen the finer points of their craft, and get away with it. It has broken down superstition and preju- dice, and has found markets for the finished work. By the introduction of oxy-acetyline to country blacksmiths it revolu- tionised and saved one of the countryside's oldest crafts, and its discovery that the art of quilting was still being carried on by miners' wives according to traditional design and method of the Tudors was a piece of real romantic research.
* * * * Advice for Craftsmen
Now, at its London headquarters, any country craftsman who is in difficulties or doubt may get advice on the technical side of his work or the keeping of his books, and he may see and acquire new designs. A large collection of designs is available, in photo-print form, at the cost of printing ; a selection of economic and technical text-books may be borrowed ; and some admirable pamphlets giving information on equip- ment, material, practical book-keeping and production costs are free. The designs in wrought iron are generally superb ; and the traditional Tudor quilt patterns are beyond any doubt some of the loveliest examples of traditional needlework done in any country in Europe. The Victoria and Albert Museum has already shown its recognition of this by acquiring two large contemporary quilts for exhibition with its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century examples of the art. In a Fascist State there would, I think, be much trumpet propaganda about all this. In England a government bureau rescues one of the arts of the Tudor nobility from extinction, carefully fosters it without changing a single stitch of its traditional designs, sells Lio,000 worth of its products in a single year, and scarcely anybody blows a note of praise.
* * * * Lace-Making
One of the arts that the bureau does not foster directly, and which I feel it should foster, is the art of pillow-lace making, which is the absolute cream of all English rural crafts whatsoever. The antique shops of the Eastern Midlands get fuller and fuller, every year, with the discarded para- phernalia of this craft : the bobbin-winders, pillows, pillow- stools, pins and patterns and bobbins. It is an art that is, almost exclusively, in the hands of the very old, and there can be precious little hope of its survival unless its methods and miracles are handed on, very soon, to another generation. Old ladies who saw the public hanging of murderers and gaily recorded the fact on the bone and ivory of their bobbins have not long to go, and they hold the secret of the most delicate and intricate of all English country handicrafts, an art that can only be taught, and in Victorian times was taught, by the application of an almost cruel patience: There is much of the very finest expression of English rural life and fancy in this miraculous craft, with its bead-spangled bobbins and its frosty delicate designs of shell and honeycomb, tulip and lily, cobweb and crown.
* * * * Cattern Tea Recently, at a small Bedfordshire village, lace-workers met to celebrate the patron. saint of all spinners, St. Catharine, by a custom known as Cattem Tea. It is not clear why they met in February, when in fact St. Catharine's Day is Novem- ber 25th. Cattem was formerly kept by lace-makers in this village of " wetting the candle-block," drinking tea, eating cattern cakes, which were caraway cakes, and afterwards fiddling, dancing and eating a giant apple pie. Caraway cake seems to have been eaten in order to mark the end of seed-sowing, which was towards the end of November. It was a custom observed in Warwickshire on All Hallows ; and in the same county ploughmen were given (raise, a sort of pancake, to commemorate the end of the sowing of beans and barley. Tusser, in his Points of Good Husbandrie, published in 158o, mentions this ceremonial marking of the end of wheat-sowing, and it is good to note that to seed-cake he adds the furmetie-pot.
Water-Wheels
The making of water-wheels still continues. This, in such a highly mechanised age as ours, seems rather surprising. A man does not need a new water-wheel, if he needs one at all, every week. Water-wheels, like church bells, last for what is, as far as we need trouble about it, eternity. So I was glad to see a man, last summer, casting a water-wheel. He was a man who, as it happened, also cast church bells. Apart from the similarity, the closeness, of church and mill, perhaps there is also some similarity between bell and wheel. Both are round ; both are instruments of music ; both are mere useless bits of ornament without the contact of outside power. But it seems to go no further. There is no similarity between the music of bells and the music of water-wheels except, perhaps, their melancholy. And beside the massive architecture of a water-wheel a bell, however big, is a mere piece of prettiness. If all the bells in Christendom had long since been melted down we should, perhaps, hardly be worse off. But the water-wheel has been for countless centuries one of the bits of essential machinery without which sowing and ploughing and reaping and harvesting would have been as useless as flour itself without an oven. Bells, like the prayers to which they call us, are a matter of taste. Water- wheels, combined with their twin stones, are part of the eternal mechanism of necessity, cogs in man's machine for keeping himself alive.
* * * * The Alpine Garden Society In many ways the Alpine Garden Society is the most dis- tinguished society of its kind in existence. Horticultural societies which worship at the feet of a single flower cannot hope to be compared with this virile catholic little organisation which deals in aristocrats from all over the world. In seven years its membership has grown to 1,600. Every quarter it issues a what it modestly calls a bulletin but which is in fact a first-class periodical devoted to alpines. In the current issue it announces some changes in this bulletin. Of these the proposed supplement of illustrations seems to me the most interesting. I am inclined to think that enthusiasm stimulated in flower-lovers by good photography far exceeds that aroused by print. I may be wrong ; but this quarter's illustrations of the gigantic Saxtfraga florulenta, Ranzondia Nataliae, Arnica alpina, and other species give me an appetite that the remaining pages, with one exception, never quite amuse. This one exception is the page announcing the Society's proposed tour, in June, to Col de Lautaret in Dauphiny. A journey to that alpine paradise, for something like £1 a day, is something which ought to appeal vastly to all alpine enthusiasts who have cursed and suffered this year's nightmare among winters. * * * * Silver New Nothing Grateful though I was for a load of correspondence on the identification of the fungus Geopyxis corcinia, I now feel that I was unwise to accept it all as gospel. For that fungus, it turns out, is not the Jew's Ear at all. The Jew's Ear ought to have been only too plain for me to see, since it is Hirneola auricula-judae, of the order Tremellini. In compensation for this ignorance, I should like to point out that the Jew's Ear has, or had, a reputation as a cure for sore throats. Mean- while the local names of fungi, so often closely allied with witchery and folk-lore, continue to delight me. Exidia glandulosa is witches' butter; and from a west county correspondent comes a note on the Silver New Nothing, Pegiza Elegans, also witch-flower, and held to be lucky. H. E. BATES.
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