Sheila Dawkins stitched on the Bristol Tapestry in 1976, and in the recording above she talks about the people who made it. Go and look at the final panel and you can find them: names embroidered in thread, one by one, by the volunteers themselves. Most textiles reach us with no maker attached, so a signed one feels like being handed a guest book from half a century ago.
The idea belonged to Jean Tanner and Marjorie Bleasedale, who wanted in the late 1960s to record the great events of Bristol’s past. More than ninety local people took on the job. Strictly speaking, the result is no tapestry, a word that belongs to woven cloth. This is surface work, embroidery and appliqué with screen printing added. Four panels run to 22 metres and cover nearly a thousand years in 27 scenes, taking in John Cabot’s voyage, the Civil War, the rise of Methodism, Brunel’s engineering and the maiden flight of Concorde.
Dorothy Nicholls, one of the first volunteers, remembers that the reference pictures were black and white, so the colours were guesswork. The stitchers dressed the past in whatever seemed right. Her father produced many of the original drawings, which made the whole project a family affair. She gave the lichen on the roof of John Wesley’s chapel its mottled look with a splash of bleach, a discharge technique that anyone who has stripped colour from cloth will recognise. She describes the atmosphere as a real community project, with some very gifted hands working beside others who were still learning.
The tapestry has had a rough time of it. At the Bristol 600 celebrations on Clifton Down, a gale flattened the marquee and the panels were dragged through mud. The washing that followed shrank one of them, and it had to be stretched back into shape by hand. A later trip to America ended with the flight home diverted to New York after an engine caught fire. Dorothy’s daughter Liz Maiklejohn, who helped out at thirteen, says it has had its share of potential catastrophes.
The museum is frank about what the tapestry leaves out. It reflects the decade that made it, and since 1976 awareness has grown of Bristol’s part in colonisation and the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. A tapestry made today, the museum says, might include a wider range of people. That candour gives the piece a second life as a record of two eras: what a community chose to stitch in 1976, and what we would ask of it now. M Shed, the city’s history museum, tells the wider story.
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Further Information:
The Bristol Tapestry is on view on the ground floor of the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery.
You can hear Sheila speak at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery on Friday 6 November and Friday 4 December. Talks start promptly at 2pm and last about 35 minutes, and booking ahead is recommended.
If you would like to read more about locally created tapestries, take a look at the article 'Patriot Games', about the Great Tapestry of Scotland, featured in Selvedge Issue 133, Kin.
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Image Credits:
All images: The Bristol Tapestry, courtesy of the Bristol Museum Collection.