12
Anna Buruma
There are three small books dealing with dyes at both my places of work. One is an insignificant looking exercise book with notes and processes of dyes in the Liberty textile archive, the other two are index books with mainly dye recipes at Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection (referred to as CSM museum from now on).1 The books are from the same period, the 1930s, but they are from two very different London firms, Liberty & Co. Ltd.2 (referred to as Liberty from now on) and Footprints. These books are invaluable for the textile historian as they give an insight into the practical side of the printing business at this time, both for the artisan textile printer and for more commercial operations. They show us the kind of dyestuffs that were used at a time when new products and processes were still being discovered.
Liberty has an extensive textile archive, which has always been used as a resource for the business. When I started, the archive was spread out in piles all over a warehouse, having been moved there some twenty years before from Liberty’s printworks. Today most of the material has been sorted and is on a database. Central Saint Martins has had a registered museum attached to the college since the 1980s. It is an eclectic collection, which includes teaching material purchased at the end of the nineteenth century up to the 1920s, such as medieval manuscripts, nineteenth-century textile samples, and Japanese prints, as well as the work of past teachers and students.
Liberty had been established for over fifty years by the 1930s, both as an influential department store and as a fabric printing business. From their earliest beginnings in 1875 as an oriental emporium with fabrics and artifacts from Japan, China, India, and Persia, it was known as a shop for people of taste. Articles in the press praised the quality and coloring of the fabrics they sold, as in The Gentlewoman where the writer goes into ecstasies over the merchandise: “how daintily are the delicate-hued draperies disposed; how symphonically the tones seem to melt into each other.”3 As Liberty became more successful, they went on to commission various printers in Britain to provide textiles to sell in their shop. One of the printworks involved was a silk printing business owned by the Littler family in Merton in southwest London, which specialized in block printing. By the late 1890s Liberty had become their main source of income and it was mutually decided that Liberty should take over the lease of the works in 1904. They owned the Merton Abbey Printworks until it was sold in 1972.
The majority of material at Liberty’s present archives originates from this printworks. The archive contains the paper print impressions, which are the tests made before the printing blocks go near the cloth. During various periods Liberty would print for other firms as well, therefore these impressions give a wonderful snapshot of a particular aspect of twentieth-century design history. In the archive there are also a large number of pattern books, textiles, and artwork, as well as some of the surviving printing blocks. Liberty was never very interested in keeping the written records to go with all this material, wanting it solely for the designs, so this little book, recording the dyes they used, is a rare survivor. It belonged to F.H. Goodchild of Witham in Essex, who was working as a chemist at the Merton Abbey Printworks. Inside the cover of Goodchild’s exercise book are written, in black ink, his name and address as well as the date, September 1929, and written in blue below, 1930–1937. It is clear from a later page that Goodchild was employed by Liberty between those later dates.4
Normally a printworks will have expertise in a particular fabric and/or class of dyestuff, and test printing will be ongoing, but at the same time there will be research into improving practices as well as trialing new products. This explains the need for the chemist Goodchild’s attachment to the works. Liberty was starting to experiment with screen printing in the early 1930s and apart from their silks, they were now also printing at Merton on other fabrics. The directors’ minutes of January 1933 mention that a new range of Special Merton Printed designs on silk, cotton, wool, and mixed fibers should be prepared for the purpose of offering to the making-up trades.5
The book opens with various chemistry tests followed by dye recipes and tests done for Liberty. It is highly organized and has dyed samples with notes on the dyes that were used, on discharge pastes and other dye related experiments.
Goodchild was obviously asked to look at colors for block printing, but also for screen printing. As would be expected of all good works chemists, he built up his own reference files of colors and methods used (Storey 1978: 99). His dyestuffs came from various manufacturers and there are a number of pages in the book with tiny identically sized color samples tested for light and washing and for discharge with columns beside each sample showing numbers from “1” for excellent to “6” for very poor. Goodchild seemed to have given up on this method early on, as despite the many pages of samples, the columns next to them stop being filled in after the first few pages. This section is particularly interesting because we are given the manufacturers’ names alongside the dyes that are used for these tests; therefore, we see firms mentioned such as Clayton Aniline Company for Neolan Blue, also L.B. Holliday and Sons Ltd. for a fast jasmine, Ciba for chlorantine yellow, Geigy for metanile yellow and chrome citronine, Sandoz for solar red brown, and the British Dyestuffs Corporation Ltd. for auramine (Plate 12.1).
Later in the book there are color strips of various vat dyes for printing, such as BASF’s Indanthrene, Geigy’s Tinon and Scottish Dyes’ Durindone colors, annotated with Goodchild’s comments. Here, there is an extra emphasis on the discharge printing technique and many recipes are given for thickening pastes to go with different classes of dyes. Discharge printing is a method by which a block produces a pattern with a paste that will extract the dye, thus creating a pale pattern on a darker colored textile (Plate 12.2). The same block can be used to subsequently color in the pale pattern or a color can be used in combination with the discharge paste to create other color effects. Many of Liberty’s textiles were produced in this manner, which resulted in the intensely colored prints, which were characteristic of the period.
Throughout the book, comments and notes on vat dyes surpass all the other classes of dyes. A vat dye is one of the most colorfast, both to light and to washing. Indigo is a typical example of a vat dye. The name is derived from the vats used in the process of reduction of indigo plants through fermentation. These dyes were used traditionally for cottons, but could be used for other fibers and Goodchild does many tests using the vat dyes on silks. Rayon fabrics dye in the same way as cotton and there are notes for using vat dyes on this base as well.
In the Liberty archive there are two pattern books bearing the inscription “Special Merton Prints.”6 All the samples have been block printed, but there are a large variety of techniques on display. There are brocades woven in a Liberty pattern with another design printed onto them; there are printed jacquard woven silks, samples using the devoré technique (where a blended fabric, such as a silk velvet on a cotton base, has a chemical paste applied, which “burns-out” the silk to create a pattern), warp-printed samples, and straightforward block prints. These fabrics appear on many surviving garments in museums, which reflect their special nature, their importance, and their cost. The fabrics show the printing skill involved, but also the expertise in the color management and the quality of the various dyes and pastes used, which must be partly due to a works chemist such as F.H. Goodchild.
Footprints was established in Hammersmith in 1925 by Celandine Kennington, the wife of the artist Eric Kennington, in order to provide space and work for young recently graduated artists to design and print textiles (Clark 1994: 82). These would be sold through Modern Textiles, the small shop opened by Elspeth Little in Beauchamp Place. Gwen Pike, who had trained at the Birmingham School of Art, ran Footprints. Little had trained at Central School of Arts and Crafts (later Central School of Art and Design, today Central Saint Martins)7 and the Slade. She had met Gwen Pike while working at Grace Lovat Fraser’s theater workshop Fraser, Trelevan, and Wilkinson in Fitzroy Street. Modern Textiles was one of several galleries and outlets that were set up in London during the interwar years to sell handcrafted products (Roscoe 1987: 147). Elspeth Little had been encouraged in her venture by the painter Paul Nash and he designed and painted her shop signboard. Modern Textiles sold not only Footprints fabrics, but also pots by Norah Braden, Bernard Leach, and Sybil Finnemore, textiles by Marion Dorn, Barron & Larcher and Enid Marx, as well as the work of Nash’s students at the Royal College of Art.
Footprints was mainly staffed by young art students. The printing method used was block printing, but rather than using wood blocks, the majority of the designs were cut in linoleum (commonly known as lino), which was then attached to wood to give the blocks the solidity they needed. Whereas woodblocks are more durable, the advantage of lino is that it is lighter in weight and easier to cut than wood. Footprints were printing the work of various students and artists including that of Doris Carter, Margaret Stansfield, Doris Scull, the “Dazzle Camouflage” painter Norman Wilkinson, and Paul Nash. Sadly, Nash would eventually take his designs to the firm G.P. & J. Baker when Footprints failed to print to his exacting standards.
One of the art students working at Footprints was Joyce Clissold. She was a student at Central School of Arts and Crafts between 1924 and 1927. The school was then a relatively small art college that the London County Council had set up in order to further the development in design and workmanship of British handicrafts and industries. Departments included silversmithing, textiles, stained glass, furniture, dress design, architectural decoration, and book production.8 This last department taught the designing and making of beautiful books, including bookbinding, leather tooling, wood engraving, typesetting, and printing. As well as studying textile design, Clissold also followed Noel Rooke’s inspirational wood engraving classes in this department. These lessons would prove to be highly influential and stand her in good stead for her later work at Footprints (Schoeser 1995: 9).
In 1929 Gwen Pike died and Kennington decided she wanted to sell Footprints. With the help of a small legacy from her parents, Joyce Clissold was able to buy the firm and she would make considerable changes in the operation of it. These changes started by going into partnership with Germaine Tallents, who took on the financial role, which meant that Clissold, who had little interest in money, could concentrate on the creative side of the business. From this time on, she undertook virtually all the designing and block cutting herself. She trained young local girls to help her in the production of the textiles. At least one of these girls, Cicily Swingler, stayed with her until the end and she in turn would train the next generation.
Joyce Clissold found a more suitable location at Brentford, on the Thames in west London, where there was more room for the workforce and living space for herself. Here she was able to expand the range considerably. Footprints had always printed on both dress and furnishing fabrics, now some of these were made into scarves and ready-made garments, such as blouses, opera coats, dressing gowns, and pyjamas as well as made-to-measure evening dresses. In 1933 she opened Footprints’ first shop in New Bond Street; followed two years later by another one in Knightsbridge. These locations clearly indicate that the product was aimed at women who had money to spend on something a little out of the ordinary for their clothes and their houses, described as “the wealthy Bohemian” in the Manchester Guardian (Clark 1994: 84).
At its height, Footprints had between forty and fifty employees, but the war would put an end to this success and although Clissold continued with Footprints after the war, it was to be a much smaller operation. She died in 1982 and the major part of her archive was donated to the Central School of Art and Design. It provides valuable evidence how Clissold produced her textiles and it includes a large collection of fabrics and garments, the blocks used for printing them and some of her drawings.
The two index books are part of this legacy. They are very different in feel to Goodchild’s exercise book; the covers are encrusted with dye and the pages inside, particularly of the first book, are covered with spilt dyes that make some of the writing totally unreadable (Plate 12.3). They contain recipes for dyes as well as little sketches of layouts for printing garments and were clearly much used by several members of the Footprints team.
Like Liberty, Footprints used synthetic dyes. While Liberty used a large variety of dyes, Footprints mostly used the basic dyes, such as Methylene Blue, Rhodamine, Chrysoidine, or Auramine. “Basic Colors” were the original nineteenth-century aniline dyes. They were not very fast to either light or washing but they did produce very brilliant and intense colors and were easy to use. They were used for printing but could also be used to paint on silk and on other materials, such as leather and wood. Many of these dyes have now been discontinued as they were found to be carcinogenic to those who worked with them. The two Footprints books appear to follow each other. Presumably, when the first one became unreadable, a new one was started. The books are packed with recipes for the many different colors used at Footprints.
Along with the dye books and fabrics at the CSM Museum there are a few of Clissold’s travel diaries and Christmas cards, illustrated with her quirky drawings which give viewers a good idea of Clissold’s sense of humor, and her textile designs reflect this same humor. The often idiosyncratic, sometimes poetic names given to each color also seem to be characteristic of Clissold’s way of thinking (she was the daughter of a vicar), such as Holy Ghost Blue, Celestial Dirt, Pale Purgatory, Nearly Neither, Starlit Sky Blue, Sick Mole, or Strong Manure. Some of the colors have a date beside them, one is for April 1929, so perhaps the names reflect the overall jolly atmosphere of the Footprints studio team rather than being purely that of Clissold, as she had only just taken over the business at this time. The colors are numbered and this seems to have been part of Footprints’ own system as these numbers do not appear to relate to any official systems such as the “Colour Index,” first created by the ‘Society of Dyers and Colourists’ in 1924.
Many of the Footprints blocks had a complete repeat design to cover the whole textile, with separate blocks for each color. Footprints also created garments with placement prints, where a pattern for the garment has been cut out but not yet sewn up, so that the printer can place the blocks on a particular part of that garment. For example, in the CSM collection there is an evening dress where the back of the garment has had such a placement print with a garland of flowers running down the back of the dress. Footprints have used some of the many smaller blocks with separate motifs, which have been reused in different configurations to produce this pattern. There are other garments, such as a day dress, where the blocks have been used to produce a pattern along the hem. The first dye book contains several pages with instructions on how and with which blocks and what colors to print a particular style of coat, but leaves some decisions to the person printing (Figure 12.1). One of the pages has the comment “leaves in Footprints grey, not too many,” implying that the printer can use their judgment on where and how many times to apply a small leaf-shaped block. However, for the same coat, the correct placement of a trellis, in what color and how applied is clearly and precisely indicated, leaving no doubt as to its arrangement.
Figure 12.1 Page from Joyce Clissold’s dye book showing instructions for printing on a coat. © Museum and Study Collection, Central St. Martins
There are references to discharge recipes in the books, but there aren’t many examples of this technique among the textiles in the museum collection. There are lists of Indigosol colors, a synthetic dye first introduced by Durand and Huguenin of Basel in 1922, which produced a true Indigo blue, for the first time completely soluble in water. There are also several pages devoted to pigment colors, recommending some as being useful for painting on tin, glass, wood, and shoes. Among the garments in the collection, there are many examples of Footprints painting colors on to them, as well as printing them.
Footprints used many different fabric bases, heavy linen, and cotton for furnishing fabrics, cotton, rayon, and silk for dress fabrics. The dress fabrics were often bought at Pontings department store of Kensington High Street in London where interesting short lengths of woven silks were sold at reasonable prices. In the museum there is a collection of 1930s evening dresses, which are made of brocaded silks, damask weaves, devoréd silk velvets, each surface producing a different effect when printed. Most of the scarves were made of georgette silk, which was purchased wholesale. Some of the best-selling furnishing fabrics would be sent for printing by silkscreen at Amersham Prints, who were able to cope with a higher volume of material. Joyce Clissold hated routine work and where larger orders of clothing came in, these were also sent out if that was financially viable (Clark 1994: 86).
Clissold’s dye books exhibit a similar hatred of routine. Where the chemist Goodchild worked diligently and systematically through all the dyes, testing them for their properties, Clissold appeared to have a more improvizational way of working, splashing the colors around the dye room. Appearances can be deceptive however; there was after all a system in place at Footprints as well. The numbering of the dyes ensured that anyone who mixed them would achieve the correct colors.
The Liberty book gives us some idea about what Goodchild was doing at the Merton Printworks. In the book there is a note that refers to the reorganization of the old color house and it is probable that Liberty were planning to introduce new dyes into the works at this stage. In one of the Directors’ Minute Books in January 1935 there is a mention of some experimental printing happening at Merton: “An agreement under Seal with Madame Astra Sark in relation to a Multi-Color Printing Process and Machine.”9 It is possible that Goodchild was involved in this part of the operation as well.
The Merton printers were experienced in printing on silk, but acetate or rayon, which Liberty called Sungleam, was a new textile for them and the Liberty book shows that Goodchild is experimenting on this base with both dyes and discharge. Screen printing at Merton started in the early 1930s, at a time when it was still a fairly new development and one that would have needed many tests before it could be exploited commercially. From the evidence of the paper impressions, the colors used for the two different printing methods differ in that the block prints seem to be crisper and richer, while the screen prints are more like watercolors, a difference that disappears later. It is probable therefore that working on colors for screen printing was one of the main tasks that Goodchild was involved in.
Liberty’s book and the two Footprints books are actually different things; while showing the working practices in the two businesses, they serve different functions. One is primarily concerned with testing the properties of dyes, discharge, and thickening pastes; the other two are principally recipe books for use by members of a small team of three local girls employed solely in making up the dyes.10 The colors produced by both firms were not dissimilar; it was rather in the execution of the printing that the differences show up. There is a deliberate haphazardness to the printing techniques of Footprints, giving a more spontaneous feel to the patterns. The Liberty prints are much more precise; there are no awkward seams where the placement of the blocks is obvious as on a Footprints textile. There is less of the muddiness to the Liberty prints, which occasionally happens with those by Footprints, the consequence of them printing layers of colors on top of each other.
The Merton silk printing operation was a relatively small one compared to the printing companies in Lancashire. However, compared to Merton, Footprints was even smaller; it was based in Joyce Clissold’s own home, where the bathroom served a double function in both the domestic and professional spheres, in being used for washing and fixing printed cloth (Clark 1988: 58). The skillful Merton printers and dyers printed fabrics for Liberty as well as for outside customers and the Liberty textiles were sold not only in the Regent Street store, but all over the world. Consistency of pattern and color is essential in that kind of business. As has been shown, Footprints themselves printed shorter lengths, often one-off placement prints and so consistency would have been much less of a priority.
Although it is tempting to compare the two companies as professional versus amateur, the truth is actually more complicated than that. Joyce Clissold was a highly trained artist running a successful business with shops in upmarket locations. The printers at Merton were skilled craftsmen, able to cut the most intricate patterns into woodblocks and printing with them to create what are now museum pieces. The great difference between the two firms is that Joyce Clissold was closely involved in both the designing and the printing, while at Liberty the design process was completely separate from the manufacturing. This would certainly preclude any of the happy accidents that appear on the Footprints fabrics, something that the Liberty printers would have prided themselves on avoiding at all cost. Despite these differences the three books show the importance of the manipulation of color in printed and dyed fabrics and in the end the beautiful textiles produced by both companies were expressions of the taste and skills of the people who worked there in the dye rooms and at the printing table
Notes
1 Liberty ar.B.342; Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection T.1.1992.96–T.1.1992.97.
2 The firm’s name has gone through many versions, in the 1930s it was Liberty & Co Ltd.
3 “A Lounge at Liberty’s,” The Gentlewoman (1890), 420.
4 Page 19 has this note in pencil: “following is some experimental work done at Liberty’s … Silk Printing works Merton Abbey SW London Between 1930–1937.”
5 Liberty Directors’ Minute Book 1910 to 1948, 215 (January 2, 1933). This idea is vetoed at a later director’s meeting, but the print impressions show that they did indeed print on a variety of fabric bases.
6 Liberty ar.B.038, ar.B.191.
7 Central Saint Martins recently shortened their name from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design to Central Saint Martins.
8 Central School of Arts and Crafts Prospectus (1924).
9 Liberty Directors’ Minute Book 1928 to 1952, 133 (January 30, 1935).
10 Ibid., 58.
References
Clark, H. (1988), “Printed Textiles: Artist Craftswomen 1919–1939,” in Ralph Stanton (ed.), Ars Textrina 10, Winnipeg: Charles Babbage Research Centre.
Clark, H. (1994), “Joyce Clissold and the ‘Footprints’ Textile Workshop,” in J. Seddon and S. Worden (eds), Women Designing: Redefining Design in Britain Between the Wars, 82–88, Brighton: University of Brighton.
Roscoe, B. (1987), “Artist Craftswomen Between The Wars,” in G. Elinor, S. Richardson, S. Scott, A. Thomas and K. Walker (eds), Women and Craft, 139–49, London: Trafalgar Square.
Schoeser, M. (1995), Bold Impressions, Block Printing 1910–1950, London: Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design.
Storey, J. (1978), The Thames and Hudson Manual of Dyes and Fabrics, London: Thames and Hudson.