Roundabout
A Stitch in Time
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN TODAY the last daytime classes at the Royal
School of Needlework will be held; from Satur- day on, the eighty-year- old school ceases to be a teaching institution. The workrooms, where cen- turies-old embroideries and tapestries can be re- paired, will remain; so will the sales depart- ment; and there is some hope that a few evening classes may be started up again in the autumn; but the home of 'pure, true embroidery in the very highest sense' will no longer in the highest sense be a school.
Protests have been going on for the last few months against the school's closing, its admirers claiming that the school's deficit (a piddling £3,000) was curable, that the LCC could be per- suaded to step up the grant, and that in any case no efforts were too great to keep the school in being. A Major Strange, not himself a teacher but a long-term student (he has been going to evening classes there for twenty-one years), has collected 7,500 signatures on a petition, but the school (in particular their Chairman, the Dow- ager Countess of Bessborough) is inclined to remark testily that the Matter is settled and the school is closing and that is that.
It would be easy to dream up reasons for a decline in pure needlework, for the lapsing of embroidery as a fine art in an age where machines do most of the jobs and everybody is alleged to be rushing frantically to and fro. But in fact there is no decline in embroidery going on— on the contrary. At an exhibition of the Em- broiderers' Guild that I went to last week there was ample evidence of a craft absolutely vibrant with life; and where the Victorian eminence of the Royal School has gone into a decline, the Embroiderers' Guild are on the up and up. In this exhibition felt trees rioted in tropical colour; white and gold angels with green silk eyes were pure and childlike to adorn a children's chapel; the Three Wise Men were drawn in black and white contemporary on the traditionally deep red of a Church panel. Best of all, possibly, were the decorative panels and the literally priceless patch- work quilts : the Guild's ready reckoning—the cost of the materials plus 2s. 6d. an hour—is obvi- ously, as they agree, no possible index to the price of an object which has taken years of loving care and even (unlike so many objects which have taken years of loving care) looks beauti- ful at the end of it. True, there were some regrettable exceptions : a petrol-blue tortoise, jewelled and hideous, with sequins and knitted legs; too many of those fiddly little pinboxes and pochettes and what-nots so often wrought by the hot little hands of beginners; and an incredible tapestry, as long as the exhibition room was wide, of which the caption read 'The Jed-Forest Hunt left to right W. F. Medlicott in his Landrover
Arthur Elliott and friend, Miss Mackenzie and "Rab," Mrs. Dalziel, Sir Stewart Usher Bt, Mrs. Bird (now Mrs. C. D. Scott) on "George's Choice" . . .' But most of the exhibits were enor- mous fun, and struck the casual observer (sorry, spectator) as being far more alive and up to date than one would ever have expected.
There could, I think, be two reasons for this. One is that whereas it may be an age of haste and bustle for the busy executive, it is nothing of the kind for the stranded suburban housewife, with more machines and fewer children than her grandmother : the rather revolting flowered pat- terns that go on unbleached linen tablecloths in the women's magazines are a symptom of this, but the exhibition showed that the urge was far from being confined to those with little or no taste. The other is a more specialised reason, but I think, all the same, that it could be a factor in the embroidery renaissance that is obviously go- ing on. It concerns people's view of Art—not so much Art-as-a-Part-of-Life and so on, as the simple problem of what to hang on the wall—a problem rendered embarrassingly acute for, the increasing number of people who want to hang up something that is less mass-produced and more directly decorative than their furniture, who are yet completely lost in the jungle of modern art. Plenty of these fall with screams of relief on things like brass-rubbings of crusaders from Heal's, or a bedspread on the wall or a big, attractive felt appliqué. There is no automatic reason, I suppose, why embroidery should not rise to the level of art, but normally that is not what is expected of it : if anyone has the nerve to stand in front of an embroidered panel and say 'It may be pretty but is it Art?' the answer can be a robust 'It is not, thank the Lord.'
It is simply decorative—and to my mind at its best when not attempting to be anything else: table linen apart, embroidery and functionalism
'1 see what you mean. I'm not supposed to ply for hire, either.' make unhappy partners—the evening bag, the embroidered box is so apt to look as if it would be better without the embroidery. And it is be- cause it is decorative that the Embroiderers' Guild's emphasis on design, on experimenting with new colours and material, on putting the stitching women of the parish in touch with someone who can actually draw, is having such a success. Supporters of the Royal College of Needlework may complain—do complain—that the art student types are in too much of a hurry, wanting to design before they can well stitch; but others say how disheartening it is to go back to the school after twenty years and see the same designs still being worked on. It is possible that a good many of the Embroiderers' Guild members, a lot of whom are amateurs, are not as expert in their stitching as the Royal School teachers; it seems certain that a stitch in time is worth nine out of date.
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