On a windswept hill, just before Northumberland falls into the sea, a tiny tin tabernacle stands quite remarkably against the elements. ‘Visitors welcome,’ a sign on the door reads – ‘except for the swallows, they make an awful mess.’
Inside St Mary’s, visitors find a plain but charming church, clad in wood and totally empty. A basin in the nave bears a sign that encourages guests to toss in a shell from the nearby Football Hall cove in remembrance to those who’ve been lost at sea, or simply lost. A few sandy specimens rattle around the pan. It’s a colourless hall, missing the stained glass of loftier churches, and so the eye necessarily settles on the small pops of blue that come from two dozen sturdy woven blocks, which sit at regular intervals on the otherwise empty pews, a patient congregation. Unique depictions of swallows, diving above the church roof, dance on each.
These specially embroidered church-kneeler designs, which speak to the position, myth and moment of the church they're found in, are an all but forgotten art, writes self-proclaimed ‘octogenarian novice author’ Elizabeth Bingham (who is first and foremost a kneeler-maker) in her detailed book Kneelers. It grew out of the website parishkneelers.co.uk, which she began many decades ago, after becoming aware of the ‘diversity and vitality’ of this form of folk art, and indeed, its fragility.
Said history, we learn in Kneelers, is a long and busy one, with the first recorded examples dating back to the 17th century. Yet the creation of embroidered kneelers by the congregations themselves wasn’t popularised in the UK until the 1940s. It was started in earnest at Winchester Cathedral in 1938, by the now relatively unknown artist and textile designer Sybil Blunt (1880–1952). The fate of these kneeler designs plays noughts and crosses with that of 20th-century social history: scuppered by the double act of austerity and war (when any needlework skill was siphoned off into more practical uses, as was the attention of those who were masters of the craft). The art of kneeler embroidery was then re-energised by the relative prosperity of the postwar years: celebratory decorations were created for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, when there was also a sense of renewed enthusiasm for local parishes. ‘Stitchers once again could engage in decorative needlework,’ Elizabeth writes. ‘Parishes across the country began to celebrate their local environment – built and natural – and to create memorials to past events, to local bigwigs and to their own parishioners.’
While kneelers were subject to the whims of social change, they also depicted it. Zeitgeisty moments like WWII memorials, a portrait of Churchill, a Concorde in flight, feature aplenty. But it’s in the quieter, more village-specific designs that the real patchwork of a nation reveals itself. Elizabeth has collected the most overlooked examples (with one chapter revealing the ‘odd’, ‘odder’ and ‘oddest’ kneelers that she has come across), and in doing so captures the preoccupations of tiny parishes that may have otherwise been lost down the back of a pew for good. We see a needlework commemoration of a local bus service in Tewin, and the bent-double figure of a Brandeston farrier; two cyclists on a ride in St Mary’s Barnes; even the Sizewell power plant near Southwold.
Despite their variety, the art of creating these place-specific kneelers has long been under threat from more than just social change. ‘I first realised that the practice was endangered when, on a visit to Cornwall in the 1980s, I found that church after church – ancient, Victorian, vast, tiny – had identical kneelers with crude designs carried out in big stitches,’ writes Elizabeth. The commercially available designs were simple and effective, but prohibitively expensive for many. Yet the ease of following these stitches tempted many from picking up a pencil and paper and designing their own. Eventually, commercially available designs began to squash out the unique ones, at the same time as numbers in churches dwindled, along with the habits of parishioners, creating a maelstrom of problems for a folk art under siege. ‘Pews were ripped out. Congregations became reluctant to kneel. Kneelers were felt to be redundant and were stored away or disposed of […] as time passed, designers and stitchers became fewer. And now Anglican folk art has all but fizzled out.’
It is Elizabeth's hope that her book may encourage congregations with interesting locally designed kneelers to preserve them. She concludes: ‘They form a small but delightful footnote to the history of art during the reign of the late monarch and are worth treasuring.’ Outside this resilient tin tabernacle on the edge of England, the swallows are getting swept up in the growing wind. But inside, pausing to reflect and rest on these mindfully embroidered blocks brings a timeless and enduring sense of peace.
Kneelers: The Unsung Folk Art of England and Wales, by Elizabeth Bingham, is published by Chatto & Windus
