Tag: dyeing

” Try again. Fail again and fail better” (Samuel Beckett)

“Blanche” on the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railway

I had the great misfortune to waste a lot of time at art school having to battle against one of the great 20th century myths about creativity. This was the idea that creativity could somehow shape the material world and could manifest itself without the mediation of any discernible skills at all. Creativity was thought to be an epiphenomenon of being, and being was definitely the thing. If you could get enough being on board you were set up as an artist. Later on I encountered much the same mindset in some of the more gimlet eyed evangelicals who had an unshakeable belief in the inerrancy of their obscure beliefs. Nowadays it’s conspiracy theorists, climate deniers, brexiters and anti vaxxers but it’s all rooted in the same problem; the refusal to examine, to question, to test and to modify your own practices and beliefs in the light of the evidence. Put simply; how can you possibly get better at what you’re trying to do – whether it’s running a country, making a pot or identifying a flower if you start with the assumption that anything you do is beyond critical reach because it just is!

I’ve heard apparently sensible writers say that they won’t read other peoples’ writing in case it influences them. They’re often the ones who make Vogon sonnets look like literature. I’ve spent most of this rainy week in North Wales grappling with computer programmes associated with the identification mainly of plants and it’s been a revelation to discover some of the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). You might think it would have been a better use of my time crawling around in the pouring rain with water running down my neck, looking for Wilson’s Filmy Fern – (I know where it’s supposed to be but it’s up a mountain wreathed in rain and mist) – but there’s nothing virtuous about unnecessary suffering and a bit of study pays better in the end.

Yesterday we went to see an exhibition at the Oriel, Glyn y Weddw in Llanbedrog involving the gathering, dying, spinning and weaving of wool – this is Wales after all. Here there was an abundance of art, technique and skill on show. Of course, all works of art begin with an idea – often very vague – but the real creative work is preserving and developing the initial vision through the processes that render it visible and never sacrificing the initial idea to showy skills. Great creative art is self-effacing about its means whilst being utterly dependent upon them. It’s not just musicians who have to spend so much time doing their scales. I couldn’t stop myself from getting down to nose-to-nose contact with one blanket just to see how the warp and weft was so skilfully woven that bright colours of the wools blended into the colours of autumn on the hills and mountains.

Upstairs in the same gallery is a permanent exhibition of porcelain, some of which was made at Nantgarw. My first degree was in Ceramics and I became fascinated by porcelain, and got to know and love the work of Thomas Pardoe – a decorator (I’d rather call him artist) of genius and William Billingsley a potter and decorator himself who ran huge legal risks by leaving Royal Worcester having signed the equivalent of a non-disclosure agreement by successfully arguing that the agreement didn’t cover the activity of making and decorating porcelain himself because he wasn’t disclosing any secrets. The technical expertise these and other working class potters displayed is awe inspiring. The process of manufacturing what was known as soft paste porcelain was wasteful, expensive and heartbreaking and neither man was a stranger to hardship and bankruptcy. The different styles of the two artists, though different, were so lovely I instinctively connected with them, and if they were alive today they would stand equal with the best natural history painters around. Pardoe produced some amazing botanical series, and Billingsley was so good at roses that Royal Worcester begged him to stay for fear of any competitor getting hold of him.

John Llewellyn, foreman – by William Jones Chapman, painter – in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

The 1800’s was an era when Wales was being stripped of the mineral wealth which was mined, forged and cast by men and women of real moral stature and turned into grand estates by their employers who often had none; or otherwise offshored the loot in English banks.

At art school, once again, we had a technician called Jack Pearce; a retired plasterer who could make plaster sing – he could speed the set or retard it and could feel the state of things in the bucket with his bare hands. Later on we moved to Stoke on Trent for a few months and saw the skills which were being discarded as the work was moved increasingly to China. Our mould maker Stuart, when he wasn’t recovering from a wild weekend, could cast anything – no matter how complex – and he helped to unload the last functioning bottle kiln in Stoke for the very last time as the industry died. As a child our next door neighbour Jim French was a glaze dipper at Pountney’s the Bristol Pottery where Pardoe worked for a while, and below our house was a marvellous allotment kept by Mr King – a fully Edwardian coal miner whose daily work involved walking to Parkfield Colliery in Pucklechurch and then walking back home hundreds of feet underground; only to repeat the walk in reverse at the end of his shift. I’d like to think that the Bristol Pottery kilns, pots glazed by Jim French, were fired with coal dug by Mr King’s forebears. My Dad was a GWR railwayman; I’m proud of my working class background

But what I’m doing here is not to promote hard work as a freestanding virtue, but to link it to the astounding creative achievements of these people; often poorly educated but who worked tirelessly to develop the skills which released and realized their creative abilities. At art school I was heavily penalized for spending too much time investigating glazes, clays and working techniques; but he who laughs last etc. If you want to be creative – I mean really creative – you’ll only ever be as good as your technique allows.

Two swallows don’t make a summer

That’s true alright. On our walk last Saturday we saw several swallows in the valley below South Stoke as we followed the lower part of the Somerset Coal Canal. Sadly the sunshine didn’t last and we’ve had grey skies, cold winds and rain every day since, except for a wonderful (temporary ) reprise yesterday. I’m sad to say that I forgot to mention the Swallows or the abundant Brimstone butterflies which seem to be having a good year. But it was the single plant in the top photo that arrested my attention when we perched on the edge of the abandoned railway line that followed the canal, for a rest. The photos below were taken in July 2019 after the Bath Quays site was cleared and the archaeologists had gone home.

I’d gone to South Stoke with my imagination filled with narrow boats and the railways that put them out of business, but when we got home it was the single Weld plant – Reseda luteola, or Dyer’s Weed that seized my imagination. Of the long abandoned canal there was very little trace, but the plant was a reminder of a much earlier industrial revolution – of wool and cloth that brought great wealth to the Cotswolds and these lovely villages surrounding the town of Bath; smaller and more modest stone buildings, from cottages to tithe barns and grand manor houses that preceded the famous Georgian architecture of the city that was mostly funded by slavery and imperial wealth.

Wealth and squalour have always existed side by side in Bath; we just don’t like to brag about it. Occasionally I’ve written about drug addiction and homelessness in the area in which we live. Sometimes it boils over into county lines battles but most of the time it’s a faintly simmering sense of antisocial behaviour mixed – as in all the best places to live in cities – with a crowd of creative and musical types retired professors, ne’er do wells and radicals of most persuasions. When they cleared the Bath Quays site for a tree lined flood prevention scheme, they found the remains of the old Kingsmead with its brothels and pubs – lots of pubs. The best of the drainage arrangements sent the sewage straight into the river and at the worst just let it find its own way. Not much has changed there then!

I’ve always been interested in the uses to which plants have been put; herbal medicine, foodstuffs and of course dyeing and cloth production. In medieval times three plants reigned supreme for the dyers. Chaucer knew them all and mentioned them some time around 1387 ( he wasn’t keen). They were Weld, Madder and Woad. Weld gave yellow, Woad, blue and Madder gave a red dye. The process of extracting dyes from plants was as filthy, smelly and disgusting as anyone could imagine. If you’ve ever made a liquid compost from Comfrey you’ll know what I mean. Brilliant it may be as a low cost organic fertilizer, but the smell is so nauseating it’s like accidentally stepping on a dead sheep in a ditch – don’t ask! The process usually begins with fermentation and then the dyeing itself requires a mordant solution to fix the colour in the fabric. These days nearly all dyes are synthetic but even they still need to be fixed – usually with a chemical mordant. In the old days they used a lot of urine; the older and more stale the better – all this done at moderately high temperature.

So both ends of the cloth industry depended on water and fuel and both relied upon and produced lots of effluent. South of Bath there is an abundance of brooks and streams flowing down from the hills, a river for transporting the goods, and later on, canals and railways. One further process in the production of woolen cloth was known as fulling in which the woven fibres were pounded with a special form of clay known by geologists as Bentonite and by everyone else as Fullers’ Earth. The power of nature had thoughtfully provided a Fullers’ Earth deposit above South Stoke.

As I said at the top, two Swallows don’t make a summer and a single plant rosette at the side of an abandoned railway line, or second group in flower on a building site don’t constitute a plant record of a whole industry. But they might remind us of the fact that even a beautiful Georgian city like Bath had its filthy industry, its poverty and squalour. Looking back towards an arcadian past of green fields and gambolling lambs is a dangerous kind of self-deception. The river is still filthy and polluted but it’s possibly been like that since the middle ages. In Bristol the dyeing trade was carried out in Redcliffe which is why the wealthy merchants moved up the hill to Clifton to escape the pollution and stink. That’s exactly what they did in Bath too. The weaving and fulling were probably mostly done in the surrounding town and villages with streams and watermills and the dyeing being done in the towns and cities where there was more available mordant – the collection of which known at the time as a separate occupation called taking the piss. The question I haven’t answered – because I can’t – is where the original dye plants were grown at crop scale. A quick check on the BSBI Atlas shows that Weld is still common but Woad and Madder have declined dramatically. I can imagine that the stinking balls of fermented Woad used in producing blue colours would have been transported, like Madder all around the country.

I’ve got a greatly treasured copy of J W White’s “The Bristol Flora” first published in 1912. Madder shows up briefly as an native plant but not in any quantity. Woad was grown in Wickwar; Keynsham and near Frome and White gets quite lyrical about dyeing in Glastonbury. As for Weld, White writes of its greater abundance in this district than in many others and he found it in exactly the spots where you might find industrial remains today. There’s a great deal more work to be done on this thread, but it’s been lovely to speculate on the role of these plants in another revolutionary age.