The Terrible Knitters Of Dent

A couple of weeks ago myself, my twin-sister and our husbands had a wonderful week-long holiday in the Yorkshire Dales, and on the first day of this holiday we visited the remote valley of Dentdale. For hundreds of years the primary income-generating occupation of Dentdale folk was hand-knitting. Their knitting prowess was immortalised by poet laureate Robert Southey in a true tale he published in 1834 about two little girls who were sent to Dent in the mid 18th century to learn to knit from the town’s ‘terrible knitters’. In those days, rather like modern slang use of the word ‘wicked’, ‘terrible’ meant ‘great’. So “they er terrible knitters e’ Dent” (ie “they are terrible knitters in Dent”) was a compliment!

Marie and I have done extensive research about the knitting and knitters of Dent, learning much about who knitted, how they knitted, and what they knitted. We’ve collated this information into a guided walking tour of Dent for my Yorkshire Knitting Tour (for which I recently booked accommodation in July next year), and during our recent visit to Dent we treated our husbands to the experience of that guided tour.

A new highlight in our guided tour of Dent is Mary Allen’s cottage. She is the most famed of the terrible knitters of Dent because she was one of the last of those whose primary income was from handknitting, and because some of the beautiful Dales pattern gloves she knitted in the late 19th and early 20th century survive in museum collections. We’ve identified her cottage by consulting old ratings maps and matching them to other antique maps and Google’s aerial images. Then in our recent holiday visit to Dent we took some photos of it. My broad grin shows my delight in this research result!

The absolute highlight of our trip to Dent though was bumping into Margaret and Jack Sedgwick as we wandered up Main Street. We got to know Margaret and Jack a few years ago when we visited Dent to work on creating our walking knitter’s tour of the village. Whilst we were discussing details of the censuses we had spread out on our table in a local café (we had stopped there for a cuppa and planning session), the intrigued elderly couple at the next table asked us what we were doing. In the conversation that ensued we learned that they live in the cottage that used to be the King’s Arms, one of the buildings that features in our guided tour, and that Margaret’s great grandmother was one of the terrible knitters of Dent. This time we bumped into them outside their cottage, and we enjoyed another lovely long chat with them. To our absolute delight Margaret brought out her great grandmother’s knitting stick to show us. It is has the characteristic diagonal ledge that only features on Dentdale sheaths, and is inscribed with her great grandmother’s initials, M.B. for Margaret Burton. I’ve checked the censuses since and found that Margaret Ellen Burton was born in Dentdale in 1878/9 (she was 2 years old when the 1881 census was conducted).