Patchwork & Quilting UK – July 2019

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Collection’ based on the donations and collections from the
18th century held in the British Museum. Today the British
Library is a legal deposit Library and the largest National
Library in the world. There are larger libraries but not national.
The British Library has 150 – 200 million items in many
languages and formulas, from early manuscripts and print to
digital books, music, magazines, newspapers, stamps, fi lm,
sound and the spoken word. It grows every day.

Books have words that can tell stories and so do textiles
although harder to read. Fabrics tell us their secrets by their
age, colours, weave, design and origin. But that is only half
the story. The human story is the intrigue; who it belonged to
and how it ended up in a museum, or in this case the British
Library. Love, intrigue and mystery were certainly part of the
fi rst two items I looked at.

The fi rst was a wedding present of an embroidery designed
by D.H. Lawrence, embroidered by Frieda Lawrence and
presented to Maitland and Muriel Radford to celebrate their
wedding (credited date 1917). It is perhaps an unusual design
for a wedding present with Dionysus in a Gondola-like boat
with grapes hanging from above and fl ying fi sh to keep him
company. The sensuous God of Wine, theatre, fertility and
ritual madness. A strange message for a wedding present
but the fact that it has survived with it bright colours perhaps
means it was accepted and put away. (©British Library Board.
Shelf mark Add MS 89029/2/12 created date 1917).

FEATURE // textile treasures of the British Library

Above: Red and white leather tooled pouch containing letters from Rupert Brook

and unpublished memoirs of Phyllis Gardner. (MS 74741B: 1911-1915. Vol1B)

Right: Front of the red leather pouch

The second item was a red leather tooled pouch which

contained letters between Rupert Brooke and his secret

lover Phyllis Gardner. They met on a train to Cambridge

when Phyllis was 22 and Rupert 25. She visited him in The

Old Vicarage in Grantchester unchaperoned. Free love and

skinny dipping in the river was indulged in (long before the

1970s!). Phyllis belonged to the early Suff ragette Movement

(1903) and a socialist (1900) which, for all Rupert’s radical

idealism; he was against women having the vote and equal

rights. He was obsessed and struggled with the idea of votes

for women and his own sexuality. Phyllis’s mother made her

break off the relationship and soon after Rupert took off for

the South Seas. So why the intrigue or mystery to this story?

In all the newspaper articles, stories, biographies written after

Rupert’s death, there was not one mention of Phyllis. There

were plenty about the people he mixed with before his death;

Virginia Wolf, D.H.Lawrence, Ka (Katherine) Cox, Maitland

Rutherford (the wedding present embroidery), Violet Asquith,

Winston Churchill, the Bloomsbury Group and many others,

but there is not one mention of Phyllis Gardner. It was as

if she had been deliberately written out of his life’s history.

When Phyllis died in 1939 the red leather pouch was given to

the British Library by her sister and not to be opened for fi fty

years. It was not in fact opened until 2000. It revealed letters

from Rupert Brooke to Phyllis and 90 pages of unpublished

memoirs written by Phyllis in 1918, charting their hidden

romance (©British Library Board. Shelf mark Add MS 74741B:

1911-1915. Vol1B).