TRac volunteer, Alice Jaspars, wrote on Saturday 9th February, 2019:

Transcribing the letters of Grace M. Crowfoot (née Hood) is far more a privilege than a task. Crowfoot, known to friends as Molly, is arguably the grandmother of the archaeology of textiles.

Born in 1877 in Lincolnshire, Crowfoot trained as a midwife before moving to Sudan with her husband, John Crowfoot, where she helped to almost entirely eliminate Female Genital Mutilation, alongside writing extensively on the textiles of the area.

The Textile Research Centre has been fortunate enough to have extensive correspondence between Crowfoot and other prominent (textile) figures of the time, thanks to the centre’s director, Dr Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood. Correspondents include the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, the textile historian Rudolf Pfister and Wolfgang Balbach, and art historian Robert Charleston.

The collection is particularly interesting, as it has both the letters written by Crowfoot, and the letters written to her, meaning that we have an idea of the way in which thoughts developed with a clearly indicated time stamp attached. In some cases, for example, the letters were written during World War II (1939-1945) and there are passing references to bombs being dropped, and then back to more pressing textile matters.

Whilst I have only been able to transcribe a portion of the letters thus far, I hope to use them as a basis for considering the ways in which individuals from the time interacted with one another, and the way in which the knowledge of the time was developed in more personal correspondence such as these. I will keep the blog up to date with anything in the letters of particular interest.

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These and other letters are being prepared by Alice Jaspars and Shelley Anderson with the idea of making them into an annotated publication (actual and/or online) reflecting an aspect of the study of textiles and the making of textile history.