Voices from Inside

Publicity swirling around Amanda Knox and her “cri du coeur,” remind me of earlier poignant “cries from the heart” by two other women, both incarcerated. 

Without access to pen and paper, the pair used needle and thread to record their thoughts. Their individual situations differed from Amanda’s, and from one another. Each woman had faith that her work would reach readers beyond the walls imprisoning her. Each produced astounding samplers.

I first heard of Lorina Bulwer’s embroidery on the BBC’s Antiques Road Show. Have a look. 

  

In fact, Lorina, who was born in, Norfolk, was an inmate in the lunatic ward of the Workhouse in Yarmouth, UK between 1901-5.  At the time, she was in her sixties. 

The curator of the Norfolk Museum and Archaeology Service (NMAS), which owns one of Lorina’s two known embroideries, describes the samplers as “letters.” The three-metres  text is stitched crudely in capital letters, probably on scrounged bits of coloured cloth which she pieced together and decorated with stump work. The NMAS  letter is improbably addressed to a maharajah.

Duleep Singh from Wikipedia

Lorina’s  text  is rambling, chaotic, sarcastic, and at times really sexually frank for Victorian times. Reference to a maharajah, an illegitimate child of Queen Victoria, and Jarrold’s stationery store read  like a rant by a deranged person, who fanaticized. Yet, research by the auction house Christie's which sold one of her embroideries in 2002, notes:

The 'Maharajah of Kelvedon' presumably refers to Duleep Singh who lived at Elvedon near Thetford.

I  google Jarrod’s. The family is still in business, selling stationery too, after 240 years! So, how much of what Lorina says is true? Was she deranged before her brother committed her to the asylum? Or did the horrid place tip her into insanity? We are not likely to find out. Nevertheless, it is fascinating that her embroideries figure as documents/exhibits on mental health in two British collections. 

Until March 2014, the NMAS has  two of Lorina’s letters on display  at the Time and Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth. They are part of an exhibition focusing on how textile  gives  “voice” and  serves as a means of coping with stress.  Lorina’s second piece is on loan from the Thackeray Medical Museum in Leeds. The Bulwer embroideries are certainly unusual case history notes!

Titia Gorter and her samplers are diametric opposites of Lorina and hers. But, they render Titia’s “voice” just as faithfully.

Titia lived in The Hague, the Netherlands in the 1940s. During the Nazi occupation of her homeland, she joined the Resistance movement that smuggled information and people out of Holland to the UK. Titia was far from deranged. She was a translator in her 60s’ and probably well aware of the risks she took and her possible fate. 

Sampler by Titia Gorter in the collection of the Amsterdam Verzetsmuseum

In 1942, the Gestapo arrested Titia and sent her to “Hotel Orange,” the infamous prison at Scheveningen. She remained there for a year before being deported to Ravensbrück, where she was executed. 

In that year, spent in prison’s solitary confinement, Titia stitched her daily routine, thoughts and hopes into a series of three remarkable embroideries, now in the collection of the Amsterdam Verzetsmuseum. 

Titia’s samplers are well planned and classically structured. The stitching is neat and exquisitely precise, even if it is on scraps of her white sheets. Titia’s “cries from the heart” take the form of original verses she composed to keep her mind and fingers occupied.   

They rail against evil, not persons. They exhort her to be brave. Then there are Titia’s optimistic, sometimes humorous drawings in thread, too. In anticipation of Christmas, she stitched a pine tree complete with decorations.  As ecumenical as she was, Titia, a devote Christian, included a Jewish menorah, too.

From Titia Gorter's "Christmas" sampler in the collection of the Amsterdam Verzetsmuseum

The exhibition in Great Yarmouth confirms what we embroiderers know. Every stitch we make is a stab at communicating:  our love of colour and texture, or our attitude toward our subject, or our regard for the person to whom we give our embroidery. These, too,  are messages from the heart.  But few of our embroideries have “voice.”  And thank goodness for that.  Aren’t we fortunate not to have been dealt the destinies that inspired Lorina and Titia? I, for one, thank my lucky stars.