On Wednesday I held in my very own hands a letter written by one of the old handknitters of Dent! It was written by Mrs Sarah Crabtree to Marie Hartley before the publication of The Old Handknitters of The Dales, and appears to have been in response to a request for her to knit some Dent style gloves. Alas, she says neither her nor her sister can knit the gloves, and that she no longer knows anyone in Dent who knits much.
Another letter in the same archive gleaned some fascinating insights into the history of extant Dent gloves, and some history of Dent stockings too. Mr Alexander Pearson was a solicitor in Kirkby Lonsdale, a little town about half an hour’s drive from Dent. He said he had always used to have his gloves made in Dent by Miss Allen, and enclosed a couple of pairs for Miss Hartley to look at, one pair made for his wife (née Marianne Collinge) in 1918, and a pair made for himself in 1923. Miss Hartley used this loan well, as his wife’s pair is illustrated in ‘The Old Handknitters Of The Dales’, as well as the pair he had already given to ‘the museum at Grasmere’.
In his letter Mr Pearson goes on to tell Miss Hartley that one of his father’s late tenants was one of the old Dent knitters, and used to make his father’s stockings with his father’s name knitted into them. He didn’t name the late knitter, but did name her daughter, Janet Howarth. Starting from the Kirkby Lonsdale address he gives for contacting her, I’ve found details for one Eleanor Sutton, born in 1840 in Dent.
So Mrs Howarth, née Sutton, was a stocking knitter from Dent, and used to knit names into stockings. That was enough information to send me into a design overdrive!
Recently my sister knitted some stockings using a pattern from a book published in 1895 that was written by Miss Henrietta Ryder of Richmond (Swaledale). The socks feature stranded colourwork in a foldover cuff:
Cuffs like these are the obvious place to put a name, and I’m confident this would be where old Mr. Pearson’s name appeared in his stockings. From the extant ones we know how names were knitted into Dent gloves, and I think it’s safe to assume the same style of lettering, based on embroidery alphabet samplers, would be used in socks too. So I’ve planned a pair for myself in the style of Dent gloves:
The yarn is already on it’s way. Malabrigo sock yarn in ‘Teal Feather’ and ‘Natural’ shades.
