Dordogne, Berkshire, Catalonia (Part 2 Berkshire)

Shetland kishie in MERL collection (atypical base)

From Perigueux to Reading for a symposium about endangered baskets, organised jointly by the Heritage Crafts Association, the Basketmakers’ Association and the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers and hosted at the Museum of English Rural Life at Reading University. The event was fully booked and apparently the same number of people had to be turned away due to lack of space, which was a shame. The aim was to try to develop a strategy for saving the knowledge of those baskets that are considered to be in danger of disappearing and to that end four of us gave talks. My talk was about the Shetland kishie, Mary Butcher spoke about several English basket forms and techniques that are in danger, Hilary Burns about the research that she has been conducting into English basketry over many years, Stephanie Bunn about the considerable work that she has done with Woven Communities for the Scottish Tradition and Jenny Crisp on the lack of more formal education for willow cultivation as well as basket making skills.

 Kishie, Cullivoe, Yell (typical)

At lunchtime we had an opportunity to look at baskets in the museum store. There are two straw kishies in the collection from Shetland but neither are typical because the bases are quite different to most of the ones I have seen in Shetland.

In the afternoon we broke into groups to discuss various topics. The group I found myself in had sustainability as its theme and included several professional willow growers who outlined the many problems they face. I was not surprised to hear one grower admit to using banned chemicals on his willow crop because he grows vast monocultures of Black Maul. I know I have been banging on about this for years and making myself unpopular in the process, but it’s still going on.  It’s the total disconnect between people and place that results in individual basketmakers working with materials that they have not harvested or grown themselves and I suppose it  must be the profit motive that makes commercial willow growers destroy their landscape and environment to satisfy their market. According to one grower, a large amount of sales are to people who are weaving  sculptures and coffins, both of which require huge amounts of willow. At least one grower even imports willow from Eastern Europe to satisfy this market. A willow coffin or basket made with chemically sprayed willows may be a ‘natural’ product but it is certainly not an environmentally friendly or a sustainable one.

In front of a monocultural plantation of Black Maul in Somerset 1982 - little has changed.

Chemical pesticides and fungicides were first available to farmers on a large scale in the 1950’s. Britains basket industry was at its biggest and most profitable prior to that in the early 20thCentury when thousands of willow baskets were being made for all sorts of purposes. They achieved this without the aid of Monsanto, ICI, Bayer, et al and I see no reason why it cannot be done again. 

London basketmakers  A.Cook  1935

When you think about it, it is obvious that any willow plantation is going to be vulnerable to pests and diseases because we plant the willows in lines bang up next to each other to make them grow straight, we then force them to make lots of new shoots by chopping their heads off every year, we seldom fertilise and we tend to plant single varieties which means that if one gets infested they all do. Added to this heavy tractors instead of lightweight horses are now used to cut (and spray) the willows on large plantations thus compacting the soil round the roots, so it’s no wonder the willows give up after 10 years or so of this onslaught. It’s time to re think the whole business of growing willow as a crop, there has to be a better way. I have read that there is a bacteria that can kill rust on willows and any other infected plants that is completely harmless to the environment or man, but I imagine it is not that easy to get hold of because one of the big chemical companies will have made sure they have the patent or they will have buried the research!

It was good to have a chance to discuss these things and to catch up with friends and fellow makers and to meet some people I had only previously ‘met’ on social media.

Hopefully a comprehensive strategy for documenting some of our endangered baskets that are languishing in national Museum stores will emerge from this event along with other activities to preserve the knowledge stored in these baskets. My thanks to Mary Lewis at Heritage Crafts for inviting me to contribute to the day. It was certainly food for thought.

Boat Baskets and Beaters

On a damp March Saturday this year, a few folk gathered at Mid Yell Church Hall to participate in an auction of the church's possessions. The late Georgian church, simple and solid, that had wedded, christened, buried and, no doubt, hectored the community for nearly 200 hundred years is now too expensive to  maintain for the small congregation that use it, so it is being sold for conversion to other purposes. In the announcement for the sale it mentioned a basket and a couple of carpet beaters and my curiosity was piqued.

In amongst the cups and saucers, kettles,Christmas decorations, a manger with fluffy lamb, pews, vases, two organs and the altar was a Southport boat basket and two cane carpet beaters, all in good condition although the basket has lost its lid. No one else was interested in owning them so my £2 bid secured the lot which included (rather surprisingly in a church) a small folding card table and a reel of very fine copper wire. Some of the participants in the auction ended up buying tons of stuff in order to support the church and when I asked one man what he would do with it all, he said he had no idea. The most poignant moment of the whole event was when the Bible, a massive, ancient, leather bound, silver clasped copy appeared and nobody wanted to buy it, not even for one pound. Everyone  hung their heads and the sense of  shame in the room was tangible.

The Southport boat basket was an extremely popular possession in its day. Many examples can be seen in museums in Britain and particularly in Scotland, the Shetland Museum has at least two. According to Dorothy Wright (p.120 Complete Book of Baskets and Basketry, ISBN 0 88914 055 3) it was designed in about 1830  by a Mr. Cobham of Mawdesley in Lancashire and produced by the local basket making firm of Thomas Cowley. Although no one else at the auction bid for the basket plenty of people admired it and older folk remembered having one similar at home. They were used for taking goods such as eggs and butter  to market  but I have  heard they also   served  as 'cabin baggage' for the many women gutters who travelled by train around the northern British coasts following the herring boats, though I have no hard evidence for this.

It isn't surprising it was such a popular basket because it was very well designed, not only in terms of its functionality but also in terms of the time and skill  needed to produce it. Made out of buff willow and split ash it must have been  a quick basket to produce because of its method of construction.
Only one simple wooden mould would  have been needed to make the willow frame of the basket, the willow frame of the lid and the ash  handle bow/central rib as they are all the same size. The lid was woven from each end on one frame with a gap between the two woven areas that went over the handle. It was attached to one of the long sides of the frame. This would have been far quicker than making two separate lids  as it was only necessary to make and attach one frame. One of the Southports in the Shetland Museum collection has a plywood lid which was obviously a replacement, but very effective and quick to do. Interestingly a fettle ( carrying band) had also been added to this basket so that it could be carried on the back  as though it were a kishie.

Southport boat basket in Shetland Museum with wooden lid and fettle

The use of  a strip of ash that was both the handle bow and central  rib would also have been much simpler to construct than a willow one, requiring only the bending and tacking of the ash strip. The strength supplied by this ash bow/rib meant that the ribs on the basket could be spaced quite widely apart thus speeding up the weaving, there are only 10 willow ribs on the full size basket. Perhaps the most ingenious design feature is the strip of ash that runs end to end underneath the basket because not only did it make the basket very strong but it also eliminated the need to fill in the gap between the  two sides  with willow, which is always the slowest and most difficult part of making a frame basket.

Given how popular this basket was I am surprised no-one has thought to make them again now. The design is well documented, it is an indigenous British basket and it is extremely practical. As  I have willow and the ash trees grow like weeds around my studio  I am sorely tempted to give it a go.

Before electricity came into our homes carpet beaters were essential household equipment. On a dry spring day carpets and mats were draped over the washing line and  the living daylights were beaten out of them by bored housewives wielding these decorative cane beaters. Not only was this superb therapy for the woman doing the beating but it  also got rid of all the the dust and moth larvae without her needing to spend any money on electricity. In our house the man beats the mats with a length of timber or an old tennis racket but I might feel a tad more inclined to join in with these lovely beaters. There are also instructions for making a carpet beater  (p.101) in the Dorothy Wright book mentioned previously.

Willows and Widdies

Some of my living willow experiments at Kew Gardens 2002

When I embarked on doctoral research at the Royal College of Art in London 1999 I had no idea really what research was about. I knew at some base level that it involved ‘finding out things’ but how that was to be achieved was a complete mystery to me. I just assumed it involved reading books and asking questions and then compiling it all into something meaningful. Four years later, thanks to the support provided by the College, I had a far better idea of what it was.  One of  the things that I learned is that academic research is pretty similar to the research one does as an artist and can be equally as exciting.

You have to start somewhere and that starting point is often just a question that you ask yourself. In my studio, it is often  ‘what can I do with this material?  But you quickly discover that in order to answer this question you have to re phrase it a million times. This is because the first question you came up with doesn’t get you the information you think you want, or need, and the information it has provided isn’t as interesting as maybe you hoped it would be. So my question to myself in the studio might then change to ‘what can I do with this material if I combine it with this technique?’ and then ‘what can I do if I combine this material with another material and this technique? It is not always quite as clear-cut as this but I hope you get the idea.

Current studio research - 'how can I join ceramics and wire'?

But, just as you think your question is starting to get the answers you hoped for, an even more interesting thing starts to happen. The research takes over and leads you to all sorts of places you never imagined going to. Before long, you have discovered the answer to a question, but it isn’t to the one you asked in the first place and is in fact often far more interesting than that original question. This explains why one of the first things  you are told when you embark on academic research, is that the abstract  (which outlines your enquiry and which goes at the front of your essay or thesis) cannot be written until you  have finished the research ! This is often one of the hardest things for the research student to accept because right from childhood we learn that questions come before answers!

I eventually  found some answers to my questions,  wrote them down in the right order and completed my doctorate in 2003. It was about willow product design and manufacture and if you are interested  it is available to download from the British Library.

It is possible, however, that research may be addictive because I have now started again, this time into the Shetland basket making tradition. It seemed to me that there might be more to it than the scarce amount of printed information suggests. I don’t necessarily mean more in terms of variety of techniques and raw materials, but more in terms of how particular forms developed and how because of the location, ecology and inhabitants of the place it became very individual and particular to the islands.

The first time I went to the old Shetland Museum, (since 2007 there has been a lovely, shiny new one) I saw a black and white photo of a woman with a back basket. The title was ‘Woman with Willow Kishie’. The photo was very clear and it was immediately obvious to me that the kishie was not willow at all, it was rattan. My immediate assumption was that whoever had written the label didn’t know the difference between the two materials and had, out of ignorance, made a mistake!

Willow Kishie

But, in fact, the label on the photo was not a mistake. This particular basket was, and always has been, known locally as a ‘willow kishie’ even though it was never made out of willow. You could say that the first person to call it  such made a mistake but did they?  It seems possible that they just used a word that would distinguish this kishie from a straw kishie and they used the word willow because they may have heard it  used for baskets that aren’t made of  indigenous materials.  Although some varieties of Salix grow in Shetland, there is scarce evidence that it was ever used for basket making and they are called 'widdies'. If the sheep couldn’t get at them (they love chewing the bark off) 'widdies' were used to dye wool.   As a consequence  the word ‘willow’ in Shetland  dialect has come to mean a material for basket making that doesn’t grow there rather than a member of the Salix family.

I cannot speak Shetland dialect, I only know a few words and phrases. So it was very nice to have Barbara Ridland, a local textile artist come to the Shetland Museum stores with me to look at some of the baskets in the collection back in March. The first stage of this particular bit of research was for me to look at the collection database and conduct a search using all the words that I thought might bring up the objects that I would like to see. It is possible that I missed out some things by not being thorough enough in this initial search, (methodology and rigour are two words that come up a lot in academic research!) A lot of the dialect words for particular baskets were spelt differently by the different people who had input the data.  This is inevitable with an oral dialect like Shetlandic  but it makes it difficult for the database search mechanism unless it has been very carefully designed to take account of these variations. Unfortuantely few of the baskets have been photographed for the database, so it wasn’t possible for me to use images as an extra filter. (I have given the museum copies of the photos I took for them to use on the database so it should be a bit easier for the next person looking at baskets). Once this initial search of the database was done I drew up a list of the things I wanted to see with their acquisition number and location reference so that Jenny Murray the head of the the Collection could locate the objects easily. That done Barbara and I went  to the Museum store for two days and Jenny and Helen brought objects out of the freezing cold store for us to unwrap examine and photograph.

 It was at this point that the research started to take over. Whilst Jenny and Helen were in the store getting the things I had asked for, they would spot others on the shelves  that they thought we might be interested in but which had not come up via the database search.  It was some of these objects that both Barbara and I enjoyed seeing the most.  This simple besom made of bent is one example.

I cannot forget Jenny saying as she entered the room at the end of one of the days carrying a tissue wrapped package  “I know you are going to love this”. We both did, because it was a little twisted and plaited doll made from oat straw that in Shetland dialect was called a “duckie” (there is an image of her on the Wintering in Shetland post). Here then is another word used in Shetland  that in another place means something else altogether.

If you want to know more about traditional Scottish baskets  and the materials they were made of Woven Communities  is a new website  recently  created through a collaboration between academia, museums and basket makers. It should be the first port of call for anyone doing research on the subject. 

Wintering in Shetland

Wintering in Shetland is becoming a habit. It is an exciting place to be at this time of year because Shetland folk spend a lot of time partying, dressing up as Vikings and setting light to things. It’s as though life is on speed. The skies and weather change so fast sometimes there are four seasons in a morning and the astonishing rate at which the days start to lengthen in February give hope to someone like me who finds dark mornings deadly. People who have never been to Shetland imagine it to be a cold place because it is on latitude 60. But, the Gulf Stream laps around the islands and during most of January and February it was a few degrees warmer than the south of England. 

It is an unforgiving, but very beautiful place at any time of the year. But, on the surprisingly many still and sunny winter days, there are breathtaking reflections of skies and sunsets on the voe. There is also a glassy sea to peer into where there is a world one is not normally privileged to see without a snorkel.  Seals barely stir the water when they poke their heads up to check you out. Being  curious they track your progress along the shore and  if you stand still they will pop up and down getting ever closer until they decide you are not that interesting after all. Then the faint ripple of their movement on the surface of the water tells you they have gone.

Shetland always inspires me to work  and I usually make some things for the house. This time it was some more table mats out of beach rope, a chest from driftwood to store bedding (a joint project with the ‘woodwork god’) and another laundry basket from a buoy. The house is let to visitors in the summer and I always hope they will enjoy using  these hand made items as much as we enjoy making them.

I also resolved a piece that I had previously exhibited but was unhappy with.  In fact,  it had been folded in half and put  in the dustbin, I didn’t have the heart to unpick my painstaking work. As I turned away from the dustbin I saw a rusty metal ring close by that I had rescued from the beach and knew straight away that I had the solution.  This phenomenon happens quite often to me and is a bit like the tennis player who is tense and making lots of errors and consequently losing badly. The player then apparently gives up and ceases worrying about trying to win.  Suddenly with the brain allowed to stop fretting it all comes together.

But, I have very little space to work in when I am in Shetland, so I mainly occupy myself teaching and researching the indigenous basket making tradition. Each time I learn a bit more and discover that what at first seemed to be one that is quite limited is in fact far richer than I ever imagined. It is also a tradition of careful and meticulous craft, nothing hurried or slapdash and  a supreme demonstration of how to exploit fully whatever material you have available.  I will write about my recent research in more detail later but as a taster here is a rather lovely little “duckie”.

Woven Communities Symposium

Scotland was very green last week when I went to the University of St. Andrews for the Woven Communities Symposium, and I couldn’t stop looking at the beautiful grass everywhere. There is a dust bowl in my garden where the grass normally grows, as there hasn’t been any rain for over a month with temperatures close to 30C for most of that time.

A group of basket makers, conservators, archaeologists, philosophers, anthropologists, educators, museum directors, curators  and artists met for two days to hear fragments of each others research and views on baskets and basket making. This Symposium was similar to the conference at University of East Anglia last year with several of the same speakers. This one, however, had a Scottish focus to it. It was initiated by Stephanie Bunn, a textile artist, willow sculptor and lecturer in Social Anthropology at St. Andrews who is currently engaged in research into the vernacular baskets of Scotland with the assistance of the Scottish Basketmakers Circle.

Image from Scottish Country Life by Alexander Fenton,
John Donald Publishers Ltd.1989
Threshers on Foula

This symposium had a practical element each day which the academics present seemed to particularly enjoy. One of the anthropologists told me he had never been to such an enjoyable symposium and that it was because the makers and artists were all so passionate about their work.  For me it was an interesting, if tightly packed,  two days and although we were not a huge group there were still some people there that I never had a chance to talk to. Greta Bertram has written a good description of the event on the Heritage Crafts Blog.

The penultimate session was a round table and open floor discussion about the future of the craft but we had very little time for it. I found it to be the least satisfactory part of the event with ideas and observations left hanging in the air.  I am an optimist and it seems, to me,  that the cultural and economic climate in Europe at this time is particularly propitious  for engagement with the craft of basket making by many different sectors of society.

“Basket making” is really a misnomer for all that this craft encompasses because it is possible, with these materials and techniques, to make plenty of things that are not baskets: jewellery, buildings, sculpture, boats, fences, shoes, furniture.  The list is endless, and much of  it can  be done with little money and without causing undue harm to our ecosystem. Perhaps, it is both these things that make it so right for the time we are living in.

Baskets, traditionally, have always been sustainable, being made with the materials of the maker’s immediate environment. Ultimately biodegradable and requiring no fossil fuels for their production they are the perfect model for a contemporary product. These are exactly the qualities that every product designer is now seeking for their products.There is a strong movement in Britain and many other parts of Europe and America towards the local and organic. I see no reason why anyone wanting to make a living from "basket making" should not have a ready market for their work as long as they do not compromise the sustainability and authenticity of their products.

It was surprising then, to hear one of the speakers at the symposium make a point of stating categorically that it is impossible to grow willow organically on a commercial scale. Yet, prior to the invention and marketing of pesticides in about 1940 all willow was grown organically and certainly in the 19th  and early20th Century much of it was grown for commercial purposes. An example being Chiswick Eyot in the Thames, where, between 1800 and 1934 willows were grown for the local basket making industry and without the aid of pesticides.

Chiswick Eyot

The commercial willow growers in the UK are mainly located in Somerset  and the reason they may find it difficult to grow organically is all about contemporary agricultural practice and the scale of it.  These willow growers, like most other non-organic farmers, grow their crops in vast fields of single varieties and like most of the other farmers suffer with all the attendant pest and disease problems associated with such practices. Given the time scale between planting and harvesting the first willow crop – usually about 3 years – it is understandable that the Somerset growers are reluctant to rip up their fields and start again with smaller parcels of land and more varieties in order to grow organically. As willows have been grown in the Somerset Levels for centuries, long before pesticides were invented,  they could perhaps find out  how to do it from  old  maps of the area.

Commercial willow crops on the Somerset Levels

In an appendix to the Cultivation and Use of basket Willows produced in 2001 by the Basketmakers Association and IACR Long Ashton Research Station there is a list of the chemicals that have been tested on willow beds for weed control and it reads like a poisoners bible. It isn’t just weeds, there are plenty of insects and fungi that like willow, but one of the main reasons commercial growers are spraying their crops routinely from May onwards with pesticides is to control “button top”, caused by the button top midge Rhabdophaga hetcrobia, which results in branched or stunted willow rods. I remember visiting Helen Tyler, a commercial grower in Somerset, some years ago to find her painstakingly trimming tiny branches from the tips of thousands of rods in order to sell them. This more than likely negated any small profit she may have hoped for from their sale but she did it because she thought she would be unable to sell them unless the bolts looked perfect. Perhaps the growers need to ask their customers if they wouldn’t prefer to accept that some willows may have branched tips, if they knew that it meant they did not have to be sprayed.

Few of the main grower’s web sites discuss the company’s spraying policies and neither do they offer non-sprayed or organic willows. I imagine therefore that a lot of the people buying these willows assume that they are buying a natural, organic product because it  looks like one and not one that could indirectly be harming the environment in which it grows, and that  also contributes to yet more profits for Monsanto et al!

Ultimately, it comes down to education, and this is something we briefly touched on in the discussion, but which seems to me to be very important.  The general public in the UK, despite being the purchasers  of large quantities of basket ware, (according to UK trade statistics over 28 million pounds worth of imported wickerwork and basketwork so far in 2012) is still largely ignorant about basket making and its related activities. I still meet many people who think that the cheap imported baskets they buy in shops  are made by machine and  very few people can distinguish between native willow and imported cane.  Perhaps we need some 'TV basket makers' who can show people not only how easy it is to make something, but who could extol the virtues of  indigenous  'ingredients' and 'recipes' and enthuse a whole generation with the magic of cooking up wonderful things with this amazingly versatile and sustainable activity.

I know it isn't easy to grow willows organically, I grow them myself,  but it is certainly possible and there are plenty of individuals and several companies operating in the UK selling a good range of organic willow that they cultivate Water Willows in Milton Keynes is probably the biggest certified organic grower but there are smaller ones such as Blencogo and Barfad in Scotland.

It is still a dust bowl here in France but maybe it isn’t just the grass that is greener in Scotland.

Baskets at Sainsburys

Of course, there are always baskets at Sainsbury’s. But they are nothing like the ones that Robert and Lisa Sainsbury collected for their World Art Collection which is currently housed in the architectural delight by Norman Foster that is the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia. Some of their baskets are on show in the current exhibition, 'Basketry Making Human Nature' along with pieces from other collections, and some specially commissioned works. The curators, led by Professor Sandy Hislop, have put together a group of baskets and basketry that, they believe, have in some way, been instrumental in the construction of culture. It makes for a visually stunning exhibition even if only viewed in terms of the forms and techniques on display. 

Added bonuses were the documentary films. One recent film included a clip about rush weavers in East Anglia (probably recorded in the 1950’s or 60’s) where a very 'posh' woman managed to evade answering any of the interviewer’s questions whilst fiddling slowly with some rushes. Meanwhile a “Mr. Percy" who was obviously in the employ of the ‘posh’ woman silently wove a rush mat at the speed of light behind her. The interviewer, in keeping with the social mores of the time, did not ask Mr. Percy what he was doing  but, instead, he asked the ‘posh’ woman what Mr. Percy was doing -  a stereotypical sociological treat! The exhibition is on until the 22 May and sadly will not tour so try to catch it if you can.

The degree to which baskets and basketry have been culturally constructive is a fascinating and highly debatable topic. It was the theme for the multi disciplinary conference, 'Basketry and Beyond: Constructing Cultures' held at UEA last week and was explored intensively by the group of international speakers which included archaeologists, art historians, basket makers, environmental artists, ethnographers, biologists and neuroscientists - to name a few. It was mental gym of the best sort. My favourite topic, i.e. basketry explored in directions that I am unlikely to have considered in any other situation. It was high quality brain food and I came away exhausted but replete and very inspired in terms of thinking and making. It seems strange that one can come up with visual ideas after listening to people talk but it sometimes happens and is very exciting when it does.

Prior to the conference I ran a coiling and looping workshop for two days at the Sainsbury Centre which resulted in some very creative experiments by the 15 students. It is always a pleasure to look at all the work at the end of these workshops and see how different each piece is. All the students are taught the same techniques but, because they have brought their own materials and personalities to the workshop, no two pieces are ever alike.

In the ‘show and tell’ at the end of a workshop I ask the students to tell each other about their experiences over the two days and to comment on anyone else’s work if they want to. This is always rewarding to do. Invariably, someone in the group who seems to feel that they have not done anything particularly special, gets singled out by their fellow students, for having created something that touches them. Even though I may have said that I like what they have done, it always means so much more to that particular student to hear it from their peers rather than to hear it from me.

 

One thing bothers me though why is it usually only women that come to these workshops?

During the conference, speakers referred to the division of labour between the sexes that traditionally goes on with basket making in many cultures. Often if the women used the baskets, they made them, and conversely if the men used them. Consequently, you could almost say that if the basket was going to be used indoors it would be made by women, and if used outdoors made by men. Perhaps this is still true, as I note that last week in Galicia, Carlos Fontales ran a course making the very beautiful traditional 'canastros' or grain stores, which live out of doors and unlike many of the more 'domestic' basket making workshops he teaches the students were predominantly male! You can see pictures of their work here. http://carlosfontales.blogspot.com/2011/04/canastros-3.html 

Man with a (very nice) basket at market!

But where does that leave the shopping basket that is used by women, and some men, out of doors?

Travelling Slowly

"Urban Baskets" is arriving in Shetland soon - we hope. It closed in North Wales on Tuesday and now packed, and on the truck, we will be anxiously watching the weather forecasts, hoping the Aberdeen to Lerwick ferry won't be cancelled and that it will arrive in time for us to set it up at Bonhoga Gallery prior to the opening on the 25th. An interesting alternative might, however, be to let the public open the boxes and lay the show out on the opening night!

 Shetland is on latitude 60, and it isn't until you travel the slow way that you really realise just how far north that is. Prior to each visit up here I spend hours on the internet trying to find the cheapest, most environmentally friendly and least physically exhausting way to do it. This time the result of this endeavour was a two day journey and 10 different means of transport. Car, train, taxi, plane,coach, bus,and then the Caledonian sleeper which rattled, clunked and swayed its way north overnight from Euston to Aberdeen. As it alternated between hurtling and crawling there was something strangely comforting about being tucked up in crisp white sheets whilst it did so.

The following day was spent wandering Aberdeen and at sunset, when the ferry slid out of the harbour on dark silky waters, it was hard to imagine being on a boat let alone on one of the roughest stretches of water around the British Isles. Fourteen hours later the 'Hjaltland' glided onto the berth in Lerwick, I haven't slept so soundly in ages. The weirdest effect of this languorous journey to the islands was that the subsequent 50 minute drive and ferry ride north to Mid Yell seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. Sometimes, after flying in to Shetland the same journey feels like an interminable trip to the very end of the earth. Which just goes to prove that time is flexible in between the rising and setting of the sun, it's only clocks that aren't.

Whilst in Aberdeen I visited the Maritime Museum. It is typical of many museums where the curators have tried to make the objects they treasure as entertaining as possible for everyone, regardless of whether or not these visitors have any interest in maritime history, or whatever else it is that the particular institution is hoarding. Consequently there is a stage set of a fisherman's cottage and a three storey model of an oil rig. The latter demonstrating very well that they are mechanical icebergs with the larger part under the surface. But, I find myself bored by the museum, there is nothing left for me to discover. It's all been picked over and cleaned and laid out by someone who is trying to determine exactly what I should understand, and experience, from each particular object. Of course, I am looking for baskets, but the curators obviously don't think baskets will draw the crowds.

Aberdeen has been an important port for fishing and the oil industry for a very long time and whilst there are few, if any, baskets used in the oil industry there used to be thousands used in fishing. There are a few crans and creels on display and some photos of them in use but no mention of where they were made or who made them. Were they men or women, this is seldom a foregone conclusion in basket making? Did they work in large workshops or was it done by 'out-workers' doing piece work in their own homes? Where did the materials came from? It is this last question that I am most curious about because many of the baskets made for the herring industry in the 19th Century employed whole rattan which came from South East Asia. It was used because it was incredibly strong and withstood the constant soaking with salt water but how did the basket makers in Britain at that time know this? And what triggered the importation of the rattan in the first place? In Shetland we have the tradition of the “willow kishie” which was actually made of rattan rather than willow, but, here there is a confusion of nomenclature that implies that the people using the rattan were not aware of what it was or where it came from and suggests that its use was circumstantial and pragmatic.

There was little I had not seen before among the fishing baskets in the museum but I was taken with this Northern Lighthouse Board transit basket (also made of rattan though described only as 'wicker' on the label) which was used to haul provisions up into lighthouses until very recently. The label also said these baskets were used because they were much lighter to haul up than the alternative wooden box. It might have been a way for the lighthouse keepers to avoid the stairs too, it was big and sturdy enough. Would I have preferred to be hauled up into a light house in the teeth of a gale in a basket or a wooden box ? I suppose it depends who made the basket and whether the box was made on a Friday afternoon or not! Personally I think either would be pretty scary.

The transit basket is no longer needed now as British light houses are all empty and automated, but it could have been a sustainable and cheap mode of transport - and definitely quite slow.

Chiswick Eyot Osier Holt

Hek Khaleeli, a friend and much valued patron, sent me a link to a BBC news item about Nick a 67 year old man who has been living on Chiswick Eyot for the past 6 months and it has spurred me to write about this very special place.

I first learnt about the Eyot from Tony Kirkham in 2002. At the time he was responsible for the Arboretum and Horticultural Services at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and he had just agreed to let me plant my grown home experiments in the nursery there. I needed to get hold of willows for the experiments but, buying them was not an option because, I wanted them to be local and readily available in order to be true to the philosophy behind grown home. He told me about this little island in the Thames covered in pollarded willows that he thought used to be cut by basket makers. It sounded incredible to me as I had lived in London for 28 years, making baskets for much of that time, yet knew nothing about it.

My first visit to the Eyot in March 2002 was in the company of Diana Hutchings who at the time was a volunteer at Kew and had been instrumental in helping me make contact with Tony. She also knew about the Eyot and kindly offered to show me where it was and to help cut some willows. Hidden behind the Fullers Brewery just off the thunderous A4 was a piece of basket making history that seemed poignantly beautiful to me in the mix of sunshine and snow that we had on that day.

I had been researching the history of willow cultivation in London for my thesis and had found very few records of osier holts anywhere in the greater London area. I was convinced that there must have been many small plots of land used for cultivating willows for baskets around the edges of the city but could find very few references to any. Those I had found were either of nurseries or plantsmen in Chelsea and Hackney who sold willows for cultivation or of its natural occurrence documented in studies of the Flora of London and its counties. But here in all its wintery beauty was the evidence that, at some time in the not too distant past, basket makers had cultivated these osiers.

The Eyot is a tiny island that is covered with water twice a day at high tides but that you can easily walk to at low tide. The Thames rips in and out of there very fast so you have to be acutely aware of the state of the tide when you visit . Diana (pictured here) had found out the time of low water and we squelched across the mud and climbed the bank. The soggy ground was a jetsom lovers paradise, thick with the detritus that is thrown or blown into the river and growing majestically out of this mattress of refuse were the pollards. We spent the next couple of hours cutting common osier rods in the sunshine keeping a wary eye on the rising tide.

Subsequent research revealed that the Eyot had been planted and cultivated for basket making between about 1800 and 1935 when the last person granted a right to cut the osiers went out of business and the island was subsequently taken over by the local council. The demand for baskets in the area had come from the numerous market gardens in the area that needed containers to transport their produce downstream to the markets of the city of

London.

Since 1949 the willows have been managed by the Old Chiswick Preservation Society in order to prevent further erosion of the island. Another incentive for the locals to cut the osiers, however, is that they block the grandstand view from the houses on Chiswick Mall of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. It seemed too strange a coincidence to discover that one of these handsome houses overlooking the Eyot is called Walpole House!

There is a good account of the history of the Eyot in the following publication for anyone interested in doing more research.

Pape, David, Nature Conservation in Hounslow Ecology Handbook 15, London Ecology Unit 1990, ISBN 1-871045-11-8

This is the BBC clip which shows the island and Nick constructing a shelter for himself from the osiers.

">http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/uk-england-11382907