patchwork

Two sisters worked alongside each other to make this quilt for their nephews and nieces back home in Norfolk. They were both equally skilled but had different approaches to creating their patchwork blocks from the materials available. We will never know if it was Sarah or Ethel that preferred to make geometric and symmetrical designs or which sister responded to the varied remnants with a fluid ‘Crazy’ patchwork aesthetic. Sarah, born in 1881, was the eldest, and Ethel, born in 1895, was the youngest of Horace and Sophia Marsham’s 5 children. They lived in a cottage in Swanton Morley in the heart of rural Norfolk. Sarah left for London first, working as a kitchenmaid in Kensington in 1901. Ethel joined her, and ten years later, they were both working as housemaids in Lewisham. They were not living in a domestic residence but in rooms attached to the department store Cheismans on Lewisham High Street. They were part of a community of 55 other employees of the department store; draper’s assistants, apprentices, and practical milliners. Cheismans started as specialists in selling remnants and job lots of textiles, but by the 1910s, the business had expanded into neighbouring buildings connected by an underground tunnel. The eclectic mixture of fabrics includes fine woollen tweeds for men’s suits and overcoats, fragile silk crepe, velvet, half silks for women’s dress, and a range of furnishing textiles from cut velvet to woollen blankets. Maybe the remnants used for the quilt were offcuts from their neighbour’s dressmaking projects or even samples from the department store. Sarah and Ethel made this quilt to keep their nephews and nieces warm in their shared double bed back home in Norfolk. According to family memories, it provided a place to hide from being told off and the subject of a guessing game to while away cold days with the children taking it in turns to think of a square while the others guessed. The children, Clifford, Mary Lettice, Jack, Joan, Phillip, and Bromley, were born between 1915-1924 to Sarah and Ethel’s brother Percy and his wife, Ellen Marsham. The quilt was donated to the museum collection by Vera Marsham, Clifford’s wife.