Many years ago during a visit to Dent I saw a red and black patterned child’s glove with a name knitted into the wrist. The glove was in a glass topped case, and I assume this was in the Dent Heritage centre. Though I was intrigued by it, I wasn’t aware at the time of how rare an item this glove was, nor that in years to come I would strain to remember the details of it more perfectly. Now with much more knowledge of the Dales glove tradition than I had then, I believe that what I saw must have been the Angela glove. Following various enquiries I think that it has since been lost to posterity.
The Angela glove features in two resources I have. One is a Japanese knitting magazine from the 1980s. The other is a DVD about the Terrible Knitters of Dent that I purchased from the Dentdale Heritage centre. In the magazine the glove is pictured in an article about Dales gloves. We’ve had this article translated, so know it was photographed by a Japanese visitor during a knitting-focused personal tour of the UK. From the DVD I learned that the glove belonged to a Mrs Young who had grown up at Barbon Manor, a grand house in Barbondale, which adjoins Dentdale. The house was the property of Lord Shuttleworth, father of Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth, the lady who founded the textile collection held at their other family home, Gawthorpe Hall. The collection is important to Yorkshire knitting enthusiasts because it includes extant Yorkshire Dales gloves knitted for Rachel and her father.
Alas, for copyright reasons I can’t share a picture of the Angela glove here. However, I can tell you that it is a child-sized adderback glove completely in the style of Yorkshire Dales gloves, with corrugated ribbing then a nameband at the wrist, and speckled palm, fingers and thumb. It is similar to the green adderback Curwen gloves that I am replicating.
Angela was not a common name in the period when Dentdale folk were knitting, and we’ve not found any Angelas in the Dentdale censuses of the appropriate period. The link between the glove and Barbon Manor has therefore led me to conclude that this glove must have been knitted for Angela Kay-Shuttleworth, one of Lord Shuttleworth’s other daughters. As she was born in 1872 and this is a child’s glove, it was probably knitted in the 1880s. Presumably the later owner, Mrs Young, was the daughter of a staff member at Barbon Manor and had been given the gloves as hand-me-downs when Angela had long outgrown them.
The connection with Barbon Manor almost certainly indicates that the glove was knitted by either the famed Mary Allen of Dent or her mother. Indeed, general knowledge and various clues I’ve found indicate that Mary knitted most of the Dales gloves that remain extant. These include the gloves Mary knitted for Lord Shuttleworth and Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth (now in the collection at Gawthorpe Hall), five pairs of gloves that she knitted for Reverend Curwen and his family (now in the collection at the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes) , and a pair she knitted for Alexander Pearson, a solicitor that lived in Kirkby Lonsdale (now in the collection at the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere. I think she probably also knitted the Inglis gloves that are likewise held in the collection at the Wordsworth museum. In the early 20th century a Colonel Henry Alves Inglis lived in Dalston, Cumberland. His son George Henry Inglis became Justice of the Peace for Cumberland. Henry was clearly a gentleman, and I believe he was an acquaintance of Lord Shuttleworth. An extract I’ve found in a 1909 newspaper confirms a theory Dr Angharad Thomas and I had previously discussed which supposed that Mary Allen sought wealthy customers through the local gentry. She and her mother had good marketing strategies!
