These lino cutting tools include a Linocraft Pen-tools set which probably dates from my mum’s time at Ripon Teacher Training College, c. 1937-39. I have used these tools occasionally cto produce Christmas cards.
The Linocraft set was ‘Déposée en Suisse’, registered in Switzerland, but manufactured by Perry & Co. Ltd., London and Birmingham. Also from Birmingham are the set of Lino Cutters, presented to me by a fellow student at Leeds, who felt that I’d be more likely to use them.
Gladys Joan Swift at Ripon
Here’s my mum, Gladys Joan Bell, nee Swift, (1918-2015) at Ripon Teacher Training College. c.1938. She’s armed with ruler pencil and a stack of sheets of what could be card, leather or textiles, so obviously up to something crafty.
She won a prize for designing a Coronation Pageant in 1937, a project which fortunately I spotted in the kitchen waste bin at my mum’s one Sunday morning when we made our regular call on her for a coffee. She was able to choose her prize so she went for a serious Oxford University Press history book, The Evolution of England by J. A. Williamson.
‘I don’t know why I chose that,’ she said to me, ‘I expect it was because I thought it was the sort of thing that I should choose.’
Appropriate choice, but it does look like tough going. My mum loved history but, as her designs for the Oakleaves Pageant suggest, she preferred a more colourful subject, such as Richard III or mysteries of the Holbein portrait of Thomas More and his family.
A quote from The Pace Quickens, the final section of Williamson’s book, written in 1931:
“There are more violent deaths on the road in a week-end than on the railways in a year, and they are generally set down to accident, as if it was impossible to prevent them. . . Public hospitals are filled with the victims, and it is even worth while for a private speculator to open a nursing-establishment near a busy road under the sign: ‘Motor casualties taken in.'”
