sanquhar knitting -
a br itish glo v e knitting tradition by Dr Angharad Thomas
Knitted gloves in traditional local patterns originate in several areas of Britain, notably Sanquhar in south-West Scotland and the Yorkshire Dales. Sanquhar and Dales gloves, with their intricate two colour designs are still knitted throughout the world and inspire new designs. Dr Angharad Thomas tells her personal story of exploration and discovery:
I’m a hand knitter, teacher and knitwear designer and my friends keep an eye out for interesting things for me. In the 1980s one of those interesting things was a pair of extraordinary patterned gloves. They are hand knitted from very fine wool, perhaps 3ply or finer, red and grey, knitted in the round on very fine needles.
According to the friend who gave them to me, the gloves belonged to an aunt of hers who lived in the Yorkshire Dales. Because of their provenance I thought these were ‘Dales’ gloves, which I had seen illustrated in Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby’s ‘Old Hand knitters of the Dales’ and they were exhibited in the ‘Knit Two Together’ exhibition in Bradford in 1983. A visitor got in touch to say that these were gloves like those knitted in Sanquhar, a small town in Southern Scotland, and that the pattern was called ‘the Duke’, dating back to the eighteenth century. She also sent me a pamphlet she had published containing Sanquhar patterns and illustrations of garments. I subsequently came across a pattern for Sanquhar gloves published by Patons and Baldwin’s in the 1950s. More research followed, including visits to see gloves in collections, but then my interest lay dormant for many years.
While struggling to write up my PhD thesis, I decided to knit something complicated and small
as a diversion. A pair of kilt hose was one solution, gloves were another. Spurred on by the purchase of a book about Norwegian gloves and mittens, Selbuvotter by Terry Shea, and a remark by my daughter about how cool it would be to knit lots of gloves, I made a start. The Glove Project was born! I have knitted, travelled, visited collections and made friends while collecting information, images and artefacts.
The history of these gloves is difficult to trace. They may ultimately be derived from those made in the Middle Ages for members of the clergy or aristocracy often in sumptuous materials such as silk and gold thread. Colour patterned knitted gloves appear occasionally over the centuries but are rare; Richard Rutt in History of Hand Knitting mentions and illustrates the Sture gloves, dated 1565 and Lord Howick’s gloves, dated 1833.
There are a few gloves in collections, though. During my knitting researches in the 1980s, I visited the Rachel Kaye-Shuttleworth textile collection at Gawthorpe Hall and found knitted gloves there labelled as ‘Dent’ gloves. I still have my notes from that visit; ‘Black/white gloves with initials RBKS and UJKS, like those in Old Hand Knitters of the Dales’. Gloves from the collection of Hartley and Ingilby, the authors of The Old Hand Knitters of the Dales can now be found in the Dales Countryside Museum, Hawes, North Yorkshire. The Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere has a small number of Dales type gloves, including one dated 1846. In Scotland, the Tolbooth Museum in Sanquhar has a display about its eponymous gloves and the Dumfries Museum also has some on display. The Future Museum on-line collection is an excellent source with many pairs of gloves and accessories illustrated from these collections. The collection of the Knitting & Crochet Guild (KCG) of the UK has examples of both Sanquhar
and Dales gloves. The Sanquhar gloves include three pairs most likely knitted in Sanquhar to order, with personalised initials around the cuff, while another pair in the Sanquhar Duke pattern was knitted by the donor’s sister for their mother, possibly from the Patons and Baldwin’s pattern illustrated. The KCG is also extremely fortunate to have one of the few surviving pair of gloves thought to have been knitted by Mary Allen who lived in the Yorkshire Dales village of Dent.
My research suggests that all the extant gloves from the Yorkshire Dales were knitted by Mary, and possibly her mother before her. At the most, about a dozen pairs of gloves of this type can be found in British collections. The KCG pair has a diamond pattern up the back of the hand but two other variations have been found; all three are shown in the diagram.
Are the Yorkshire and Sanquhar gloves linked? This is a question I asked myself thirty years ago and am still trying to answer. It seems that there could have been links between Yorkshire and Sanquhar; both were centres of lead mining and there was also cattle trading between the Yorkshire Dales and southern Scotland. As people moved for work or with livestock, patterns and knowledge of techniques of the glove knitting could have been disseminated.
The knitted patterns in the glove fabrics are made using two colours of yarn in small repeats, often producing similar patterns to those found in the locally woven cloth. The simplest is a seed stitch, consisting of alternate rows of alternating colours. Other patterns use this as a background for small motifs, of which the most common is ‘Midge and Flea’ found in both Sanquhar and Dales gloves. Pheasant’s eye patterns are similar. The Duke pattern from Sanquhar is said to have
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