E is for Embroidery

“Success is not fame or money or the power to bewitch. It is to have created something valuable from your own individuality and skill, a garden, an embroidery, a painting, a cake, a life." Charlotte Gray, Canadian biographer and historian

This sampler is an example of embroidery created to demonstrate skill and proficiency in needlework. 
Tauranga Museum, 0283/84.

This embroidery sampler was created in 1913 by Iris Shead and, according to Tauranga Museum’s receipt book, was donated to the collection in 1972 by Mrs Wapp. When I first came across it, a few questions quickly came to mind: Who was Iris? How old was she when she embroidered the sampler? And where, or what, was Hamont?

Research revealed that Iris was born in Ashburton in 1898 to Amy and Walter Shead. Just a year after her birth, her mother was involved in a shocking railway accident at Rakaia, where four passengers were killed when two excursion trains collided due to excessive speed. Amy was pregnant at the time and sustained serious back injuries, prompting Walter to take a civil case against the Crown. The case was successful and became something of a landmark, leading to improvements in railway safety across New Zealand. Amy received £700 in compensation, and Walter £500, awarded for “the expenses he had been put to by his wife’s illness (he had been forced to hire a housekeeper) and as compensation for the loss of society and companionship.”

The Rakaia Railway Disaster: view of wrecked carriage in which victims were killed. 
Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections AWNS-18990324-04-03

 You may be wondering what any of this has to do with an embroidered sampler. A few months after receiving the payout, the Shead family left New Zealand for Europe. By 1913 Iris, aged 14 or 15, was living in Hamont, Belgium, where she embroidered this sampler.

In 1920, Iris married Englishman Wilfred Phillips, had a son, and eventually returned to New Zealand. She later divorced Phillips and, in 1927, married Arthur Wapp. Together they would also have a son. Through all these moves and life changes, Iris’s sampler travelled with her. Toward the end of her life, she chose to preserve it by donating it to the museum’s collection. What initially appears to be a modest example of needlework becomes something far more evocative - a stitched record of a young woman’s life shaped by family tragedy, migration, and resilience.

Finding new appreciation

Working with the Tauranga Heritage Collection over the years, I’ve come to appreciate, if not love, some surprising objects. Top of my list is our Marshall Steam Traction Engine.  I’ll never forget having the opportunity to drive it - to feel the heat from the firebox and the rumble of the ground beneath the solid rubber tyres. It made a traction engine convert out of me.

Marshall Sons & Co Steam Traction Engine (1904) at the Tauranga A. & P. Show, Tauranga Racecourse, 2009
Tauranga Heritage Collection Ref. 1358/85

Recently I’ve been working with the Tauranga Embroiderers’ Guild to delve into our textile collection in preparation for Stitch-a-Plenty, the Association of New Zealand Embroiderers’ Guild’s National Conference to be held in Tauranga July 2022. It has been a wonderful experience seeing the collection though their eyes. And once again, it has given me new appreciation for objects I’ve not considered before. This time it’s tea cosies.

The Tauranga Heritage Collection has a wonderful variety of tea cosies demonstrating nearly every type of embroidery skill from whitework and cutwork to beading and pulled thread (example). However, my two favourites are a lovely Victorian beaded and Berlin work cosy and a cottage shaped silk thread-embroidered cosy, which likely dates from the 1930s. Both were donated by local families.

Victorian beaded and Berlin work tea cosy. Tauranga Heritage Collection, 2928/84

Cottage shaped silk thread embroidered tea cosy. Tauranga Heritage Collection, 1736/84

It came as surprise to me that the first documented use of a tea cosy in Britain was in 1867. I had imagined it would be much earlier. There is some suggestion that covers to keep tea warm would have been in use when tea was first introduced into England in the late 1600s. It was during the Victorian era that the tea cosy craze took hold and no respectable home or tea party host was without one. Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford, is credited with popularising afternoon tea and, by association, the cosy. But if you think the cosy has been relegated to the past you might be surprised to know that these days, like many old traditions, it is finding a new audience. Hopefully our small collection can provide tea enthusiasts with some inspiration.

References

Richard Rutt, A history of hand knitting. (London: Batsford. 1987).
https://blog.dominiontea.com/2017/04/29/history-tea-cozy/