Swaledale Gloves – A Heritage Knit

Many knitters that are familiar with the Sanquhar glove tradition would assume that use of the shepherd’s plaid pattern for gloves originates in that tradition. However, the oldest known pair of gloves to feature shepherd’s plaid were in fact knitted in Swaledale, Yorkshire. We know this because they were seen and recorded by Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby in ‘The Old Handknitters Of The Dales’, for which Marie sketched them.

Marie and Joan tell us the gloves belonged to a Miss H Banks of Askrigg, and were knitted by her mother in Upper Swaledale when she (Miss Banks’ mother) was a girl, circa 1850. The sketch and accompanying text tell us that the name ‘S Hunter’ was knitted into the wrist. Happily these details were enough for me and Marie to trace the knitter.

Sarah Hunter was born in 1839 to a Yorkshire coal mining and farming family. They lived on a small farm (20 acres) at Hart Lakes, a part of Kidson Fell near Keld. No doubt this is where she learned the necessary skills for work as a dairy maid, for this is what we find her doing in 1861 when she was living with the Fawcetts on their 155 acre farm at Thwaite. Sometime between then and 1867 she married a joiner called William Banks and set up home with him in Askrigg, where they had two children, Hannah (Miss H Banks) and Margaret. Alas, William died at what nowadays we would consider to be a young age as by the time of the 1881 census Sarah was widowed and had set up shop in Askrigg as a grocer, assisted by Hannah.

How had Sarah learned to knit so well that when still a child she could knit a pair of beautifully patterned stranded colourwork gloves? The answer most probably relates to where she lived because in the early nineteenth century handknitting was a major industry in Swaledale, holding its own alongside farming and leadmining. In 1823 alone the handknitted goods (mostly stockings) of Swaledale and neighbouring Wensleydale yielded £40,000, which is about 5 million pounds in today’s money! It’s therefore reasonable to assume that poor children in the valley were taught to knit in school as a potential means of alleviating poverty, as was done in charity schools across the country, including York’s knitting school and the little farmhouse schools in Dentdale. I wonder if Sarah attended such a school and knitted her gloves as a school project? It’s a fair question as the chapelry she lived in had two charity schools, which William White’s 1840 directory tells us were being liberally funded by a Mrs Cope for the education of 100 girls.

One of the antique books in my collection ‘The Knitting Teacher’s Assistant’ (mine is dated 1831) was for teaching stocking knitting by rote in such schools:

Why am I telling you all this today? My twin-sister (Marie) loves re-creating old knits with a Yorkshire heritage for us to display on my Yorkshire Knitting Tour. She has already knitted some gloves based on the Dentdale gloves in the Knitting and Crochet Guild collection, and now she is knitting some gloves based on Sarah Hunter’s gloves, which we call the ‘Swaledale Gloves’. Using the illustration from OHOTD and knowledge of other Dales gloves, we have reverse engineered a pattern for them, including the fringed cuff, a feature that Hartley and Ingilby noted the earliest known Dales gloves had in common. This weekend we filmed Marie creating the fringe, which was formed from a strip of garter stitch:

The original Swaledale Gloves were red and black, so Marie, who is a purist, dyed some vintage Yorkshire 3ply yarn (Ladyship Babyship by Baldwin & Walker of Halifax) in those colours to knit hers with. She’s already started the second glove for the pair, so they will be ready in plenty of time for this August’s Tour.