Hand-made lace making was important in Nottingham, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Devon, especially around Honiton. Newport Pagnell’s wealth and fine Georgian houses in the High Street are attributable to its lacemaking industry from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
There are two techniques for hand-made lace; bobbin lace and needlepoint. Bobbin lace uses cards on which the pattern is pricked out and a bewildering number of bobbins are moved to create the design. The needles for the pattern were stuck into a ‘pillow,’ a large cushion stuffed with horsehair or straw until it was packed tight, and the bobbins wound around them whilst the pillow rested on a three-legged stool called a horse. Bobbin lace made in Newport Pagnell was Bucks Point, named after the county but not exclusive to it.
Needlepoint uses a needle and one thread, a bit like crochet, and is regarded as a quicker form of lace making.
In the 1851 census, there were over 250 lacemakers, all women, listed as working in Newport Pagnell, not including those in the workhouse. With over 3,600 people, this equates to nearly seven per cent of the population. In addition, there was a lace dealer and grocer (male) who presumably pursued both occupations to make a living.
According to a letter from local poet William Cowper in July 1790, the nearby ‘beggarly’ town of Olney had 1,200 lacemakers out of a population of 2,000; sixty per cent of the town eked a living from lace and, according to Cowper, they were distressingly poor. Queen Victoria had yet to make lace fashionable again. Links to the Buckinghamshire lace industry can be found on www.mkheritage.co.uk.
In neighbouring Bedfordshire, lacemaker burials from parish registers 1717–1809 for Turvey are listed online at www.turveybeds.com/lacemaking.html. Young children were taught to make lace, but not necessarily literacy, at the school in Newton Lane and such schools were common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Like their counterparts in Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, Devon lacemakers, wives of labourers and fishermen, supplemented the family income by making lace at home and selling it to agents and shop owners.
Nottingham’s lace trade was centred on the Lace Market, with salerooms and warehouses housing lace made in local factories or brought in from outworkers. From as early as 1800, this trade was warehouse and factory based, with twelve-hour working days six days a week, extended to Sundays during busy periods. Apart from ‘finishing’ work, most employees were men and the machine work was regarded as so physically demanding that boys under fourteen were generally not employed from 1833. Their apprenticeship usually lasted seven years and, in the early 1900s, boys could earn thirty-three shillings a week, whereas a bank trainee might only receive ten shillings. The outworkers, mainly women, worked under appalling conditions at home finishing the lace. An outworker mistress collected work from the warehouse, for which she was given a fixed price. She then distributed the work amongst other women, who often engaged their families and children as young as eight (younger before the 1860s) to mend, separate nets and cut off loose threads before returning the work to the mistress to collect the pay. Although the work was undertaken in miserable conditions, it was regarded as better than working in a factory. In 1873, a fifty-two hour working week was considered short.
Because of the hours spent inside (country homeworkers sat outside on summer days), lacemakers were pale and unhealthy with poor eyesight, stooped from working over lace from so young for so many hours. Tuberculosis was common.
The Industrial Revolution introduced machine-made lace and by 1900 most hand-made lace had disappeared.
Finding specific information about a lacemaker ancestor is difficult. Although lacemaking in its heyday paid more than an agricultural labourer earning eleven shillings a week in the 1850s down to seven in the 1870s recession, it was a cottage industry without formal apprenticeships and no written records, carried out largely by women (Newport Pagnell parish registers list a few male lacemakers) who, because of their lowly status and the poor recognition of lacemaking, are often unrecorded.
If you have ancestors who were lacemakers, try searching the name of their village to find a dedicated website where you might find helpful information about your family. If your lacemaking ancestors hail from Devon, Kirsty Gray’s Tracing your West Country Ancestors (Pen and Sword, 2013) has an excellent bibliography and suggestions of relevant West Country websites.
Notwithstanding the time required to fashion it and therefore its prohibitive cost, modern hand-made lace is still made by devotees in Olney, Buckinghamshire www.olneylacecircle.co.uk and by the Lace Guild www.laceguild.org based in Stourbridge. They have a collection of over 15,000 objects relating to lace making including bobbins, netting needles and lace samples. Their website has videos on how lace is made and explains its history.
• Many museums have displays of clothing and accessories. These are a selection; you may need an appointment to visit some specialist collections.
• The Bowes Museum Fashion and Textile Gallery, Barnard Castle, County Durham www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk; wide collection of costumes and textiles and the Blackborne lace collection.
• Costume and Textile Association, Norwich, www.ctacostume.org.uk; collection of shawls representing the textile trade in Norwich.
• Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney, Bucks www.cowperandnewtonmuseum.org.uk; explanation of lace making and local examples.
• Fashion Museum, Bath, http://www.museumofcostume.co.uk plus collection of gloves www.glovecollectioncatalogue.org
• Hope House Costume Museum and Restoration, Hope House, Alstonefield, Derbyshire www.hopehousemuseum.co.uk; appointment only.
• The Lace Guild, Stourbridge, www.laceguild.org; visits by prior arrangement.
• Museum of London www.museumoflondon.org.uk; varied collection of clothing and accessories; 2,500 buttons collected over thirty years from the River Thames by mudlark Tony Pilson, in storage but viewable online http://collections.museumoflondon.org.uk/online/searchresults.aspx?description=2009.33&newAdvSearch=true.
• Platt Hall Gallery of Costume, Manchester, www.manchestergalleries.org/our-other-venues/platt-hall-gallery-of-costume; clothing and accessories from around 1600; Alan and Gillian Meredith’s button collection of over 100,000 buttons dating from circa 1500. The collection is online.
• Stockport Hat Works www.stockport.gov.uk/hatworks.
• Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, www.waddesdon.org.uk; costume and accessories, lace (not English) and 600 buttons.
• York Castle Museum; fans, shawls, underwear and clothing from ordinary people; www.yorkcastlemuseum.org.uk/Page/ViewCollection.aspx?CollectionId=8
• V&A Museum www.vam.ac.uk.