During WWII, hundreds of prisoners of war were interned in Changi Prison, civilians who were in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in February 1942. During their imprisonment, quilts were literally scrapped together at the camp. Several quilts were made by adult women who wanted to show their husbands that they were still alive; that’s the topic for next week. However, I wanted to start with the Changi quilt done by a Girls Guide group that formed within the prison, which is the topic of this week, as the web seems to have less information on this quilt than on the others. While some of the resources are the same, I’ve extracted text specific to each group, as these quilts are so important I think that they deserve separate posts.
Together with the civilian men, the women and children were crowded into Changi Prison, a building designed to hold about 600 inmates and now accommodating about 2,400. The women and children occupied one wing of the building until 1944 when they were moved to another Singapore camp at Syme Road. For the purposes of the Japanese administration, children were deemed to be all female children of whatever age and male children up to the age of twelve. Twelve-year-old boys were automatically transferred to the male section of the prison whether or not they had relatives there. Internees were permitted to run schools for the children during the first few years of captivity although the subjects were limited. The teaching of history and geography was not allowed.
She describes how they worked in the baking fields, growing crops they harvested but were never allowed to eat. When their dresses rotted in the sun, they would unpick the seams and reuse the thread for the quilt. Under Mrs Ennis’s instruction, they learned patchwork but also sewed their Guide badges and emblems. “Needles and thread were worth more than gold,†says Olga. “Whenever we left our cell, we had to post someone on duty so we weren’t robbed.†As they sewed, they were on constant alert for the sound of approaching Japanese guards. At the clatter of boots, they stuffed the patchwork into their knickers. ….
“The idea of children being interned is a powerful one,†says Pritchard, who spent six years on the exhibition. “What is seditious in sewing? They were trying to normalise their lives.†To Olga, each hexagon is a coin in her memory bank.
The newly-married Mrs Ennis, who inspired the quilt, had been a nurse with the Indian Army when she and her British husband, Capt Jack Ennis, were imprisoned. She was proud that, as she put it: “Out of the grimness and misery of internment something so beautiful could be made by the Guides who had lost all their possessions – but still had courage.†After her death three years ago, the quilt was presented to the Imperial War Museum. “Mum was always a keen Guideâ€, says her daughter, Jackie Sutherland. “She gave the girls a focus. The quilt became part of our family lore. To see how much stock others put in it is very emotional.â€
This past Tuesday I learned how to not be scared of my sewing machine thanks to an Intro to Sewing course at Bits of Thread here in DC.
It was so momentous that I literally had the following clip from What About Bob? in my head:
I have slugged my grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine to my various apartments for over a decade now, yet been so scared of using it that I had only actually tried it out once or twice. I had literally become a Luddite, as I kept saying things like “it’s too fast” or “I can’t handle all those moving parts” whenever talk of me actually using it came up in conversation, as not only do I have it, but it sits permanently in my living room (it’s built in to a table).
So, I decided to face my crafty fear and go for it. Here are the results:
Ahoy! Now how I know how Bob felt in that clip and feel so triumphant for having mastered my fear of the moving needle!
Curious, do you have any crafty fears? And if so, have you mastered them?
I took this photo of Bobbin the other week and to me it pretty much embodies what, to me, is essential for “home,” a furry one and some handmade items. Every time I see her curled up with this pillow it reminds me how much I love my grandmother, who made it. As she gets older she likes to give away her things, and once when I was visiting her at her retirement home, she tucked this under my arm without warning and said, “I want you to have this.”
Store-bought pillows just don’t hold the same resonance, depth, and warmth. As lovers of things handmade, I think we are lucky to appreciate the work that goes into them, as they hold traces not just of the hands that made them, but of the people themselves.
Welcome to Week 3 of 48 Weeks of Historical Craftivism! This week we have a lovely guest post by the lovely and amazing Sayraphim Lothian.
Craft Activism – the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp
Protesters ring the Greenham Common fence decorated with handmade banners and other items (date unknown)â€
On the 5th of September, 1981, the Welsh group Women for Life on Earth arrived at Greenham Common, an RAF Airbase in Berkshire, England. The group intended to challenge the decision to situate 96 Cruise nuclear missiles at the site, and presented the Base Commander with a letter requesting a debate on the topic. The letter stated, amongst other things, “We fear for the future of all our children and for the future of the living world which is the basis of all lifeâ€(1).
When their letter was ignored, they set up a Peace Camp just outside the fence. By 1982, the camp had become women only and with a strong feminist emphasis. In the following months and years thousands of women came to live and protest at the newly named Women’s Peace Camp(2), which now consisted of nine smaller camps at various gates around the base(3).
The women’s activism came in many forms, a considerable amount of it focused on the 9 mile fence that ringed the perimeter. In an interview with The New Statesman in 2007, the General Secretary for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Kate Hudson recalls “…block[ing] the gates, pull[ing] down parts of the fence, danc[ing] on the missile silos, and creatively express[ing] our opposition to the missiles.(4)â€
In the camps between raids on the base, the women spent time making banners and weaving words, symbols and items such as toys and children’s clothing, into the fence(5). The banners were created both to hang on the fence and hold in protest marches that happened regularly around the perimeter. One of the most prolific banner makers was Thalia Campbell, who started making banners to address the stereotype of the Greenham Common women.
I did decide that I was an artist and I could have been one more body around the fire but I thought ‘no’, and we were so vilified… people did think we were dirty slags, lesbians, bad mothers and all this kind of stuff, like, like they vilified the suffragettes in the early days, but the vilification was so untrue I thought we had to counter it, so that’s why I started making my banners really, to sort of use beauty and humour to put our point across, because that vilification… So that’s why I made all the banners really and to tell the story… I used to go up and put them on the fence and gradually this became a great big display on the fence.(6)
As well as banners protesting nuclear weapons, other banners (such as the one above) were created to show where the women were from, to show the media and the world that this was not a local issue.
The fence was also the focus of activism through weaving. Alongside toys and children’s clothes, which acted as signifiers of women’s ongoing everyday lived experience, in opposition to the destructive patriarchal threat within, and outside, the base(7), words, slogans and symbols such as peace signs, doves and rainbows were also often incorporated into the chain links.
A protester remembers there was a lot of weaving things in the perimeter fence – rainbows, kid art, … the whole perimeter fence was very gorgeous. There were a lot of spiderwebs in the art. Spiderwebs were a big theme – I suppose the theme of weaving something, surrounding something(8). Another theory as to why the weaving of the webs was that “Before the world wide web connected people across the world, women at Greenham used the metaphor of a spiders web to imagine global connections between peace activists.(9)â€
The webs often extended out to entangle the surrounding trees, the protesters themselves and the workmen and machinery that were sent in to remove them. A subcontractor who had driven his bulldozer in to remove a tree house stated in court “… the girls got in front of the machine. They stood there and a couple walked round [the bulldozer] with woollen string, going round and round with it…(10)†When the women were arrested and taken to court, some used the time to make webs there for installation later back at the camp(11).
The weaving was so important that mention of it made it’s way into protest songs, which were composed at the camp or modified from older songs and sung during protests, court hearings, while in prison or at home in the camp. We are the flow and we are the ebb and I am the weaver both appear in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp Songbook, handwritten in 1983, photocopied in batches and sold to raise funds(12).
We are the flow
and we are the Ebb
We are the weavers
We are the web(13)
In 1981, at the very start of the Peace Camp, the women adopted the dragon as their symbol(14), explaining on a 1983 photocopied invitation that “The word ‘dragon’ derives from a word meaning ‘to see clearly’. She is a very old and powerful life symbol.†The invitation was to participate in The Full Moon in June Dragon Festival, where women were invited to feast and create a Rainbow Dragon together. Invitation 1 reads in part: At USAF Greenham Common, Newbury, Berkshire on the 25th June, a Rainbow Dragon will be born by joining the creative work of thousands of women… Women are making pieces of patchwork, banners, cloth paintings to join into the Rainbow Dragon for the future(15).
Three other invitations were also produced, the second of which invites women to “Dress up if you want – wear the colours of fire – make smaller dragons… believe in yourselves and know that our positive, creative energy will change the world.(16)†The visitors to Greenham that day bought patches and material from home and from women who couldn’t make it to the camp. Over the course of the day they helped sew together a 9 mile Rainbow Dragon, which then encircled the fence.
The Rainbow Dragon at Greenham Common, 1983The Rainbow Dragon at Greenham Common, 1983The Rainbow Dragon at Greenham Common, 1983
The Rainbow Dragon at Greenham Common, 1983
An article in an undated Greenham Common newsletter talks about the Rainbow Serpent from Aboriginal mythology and emphasises it as a:
‘universally-respected divinity’, a guardian of humanity, and a metaphor for menstrual cycles, and as such an important symbol for Greenham Common Peace Camp women … The Rainbow Serpent also represented ‘the dragon [that was] slaughtered by some patriarchal hero who established the present world order from which we are still suffering’. However, as a phoenix from the ashes, the dragon… is stirring from her sleep allowing, ‘the Australian Aboriginals and the American Indians, together with traditional people and women everywhere [to have] the last word(17)’
The dragon was clearly a powerful symbol for the women to create together and surround the base with and it’s nine mile length showed the world that many voices were joined as one to protest the nuclear weapons being held behind the fence.
Living conditions were primitive at Greenham Common. Living outside in all kinds of weather especially in the winter and rainy seasons was testing. Without electricity, telephone, running water etc, frequent evictions and vigilante attacks, life was difficult. In spite of the conditions women, from many parts of the UK and abroad, came to spend time at the camp to be part of the resistance to nuclear weapons(18). But the women made their protest heard, all around the world, with interventions, songs, marches, banners, costumes and craft based installations.
Ultimately, in 1991, the nuclear weapons were removed after US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which meant that the cruise missiles were taken back to America(19). The camp and the women remained for another nine years, as part of a protest against the UK Trident program, which is the ongoing operation of the current generation of British nuclear weapons(20) before leaving for the last time in 2000.
A Thalia Campbell banner on the Greenham fence (date unknown)
This is the 2nd part in a 3-part blog post, about what I’m calling The 3 -Tions* of Craftivism. (You can read about them here.) You can see the first part, on Craftivism and Donation here. The 2nd -tion of craftivism is beautification.
This is found in acts like yarnbombing. (And in scratching my head about this, I could only really think about yarnbombing, so you tell me, what am I missing?)
It’s taking your everyday surroundings in your own city and making them beautiful instead of barren.
However, I also think it comes with some responsibility to:
1. Not destroy property.
2. Check up on your work; make sure it is still in good shape from time to time.
3. Fix your work if it comes undone or someone messes with it.
4. Take down your work if it becomes too damaged to repair or it is looking unsightly!
Above, all, just remember the aim here is to beautify and make people look differently at old surroundings. A few examples:
And it has me wonder if this was true. (What are your thoughts?) I think in some cases this can be true, as yarnbombing can be fluffy and full of good-natured hijinks like chick flick movies. But, should it be more? Should there be more that is strictly political to give yarnbombing more weight? Or is it lightness just enough to get people interested in their surroundings again, which is political enough?
*ETA: Spring 2015, I switched the “-tions” to “tenets.”
