As we continue the project to return the The Anna Mansi WWII CRCQ collection to Canada, to find a permanent home for these forty quilts, we are reminded that textiles carry memory, emotions and relationships. Sometimes, the sentiments are specific, such as a mother making a quilt for her child. But for the wartime quilts, when the maker was not known to the recipient of the quilt, and the recipient did not know the maker, the memory and emotions and relationships can only be surmised, assumed and imagined. What did a woman feel she assembled quilt blocks from scraps of factory-offcuts into an item of warmth for a stranger. What did women think about, and talk about, as they sat around a quilt frame together in their homes or workrooms, chatting, sharing, teaching skills. Did they comfort and console those in their group who were experiencing grief and loss, did they laugh about the antics of their young children, did they chat about the voyage ahead for the quilt they were stitching and wonder about what part of Britain it would arrive in? Did they wonder about who would receive it, how the recipient would feel, what their life would be like and whether they would care for the quilt?
A woman named Beulah Hussey, aged 23 or 24, from Otterville, Ontario, stitched a note onto the quilt she made in 1940 or 1941, including her name and address. We don’t know how long she had to wait for a reply, but we know that when it arrived, she saved it, as well as the envelope, all her life until she died in 1993. When our GoFundMe campaign began, Beulah’s daughter Dale remembered that letter in her mother’s possessions and brought it forward to share. The letter and her mother’s photo is shared by Dale Condie.
Dear Miss Hussey, I don’t really know how to start this letter because I have so much to say, but first I will thank you for the wadded quilt. In the first place I did not get the quilt from any depot. My sister was an evacuee and she had it given to her by a Billeting Officer, for her children & then I was blasted out, a bomb dropped on the back of where I lived and my bed was all right but my boys bedroom was so badly damaged that I had no bedclothes for him and we had to evacuate because the raids made my little girl ill. So, my sister gave me the quilt for my boy’s bed when we came back to London. Well that was in August and I have had to store my furniture until I can get a place suitable as I am staying at my mother’s home. So, on the 21st my brother John came home on 48 hours leave, he is 20 and he is a flight mechanic in the R.A.F. so we has to make a bed up for him & his friend so I got the quilt out of my case & you can imagine my surprise when I found the letter stitched in. I took it in the kitchen and showed my brother and husband & my two children – they all clamoured to read it, well now I have put the quilt back until I can get a nice place and my boy wants it for his own, he is 13 years and my little girls is 5 years but if we have any more raids it will be very useful to cover over them down in the shelter. I have written and told my sister but she is rather miserable and worried because her husband has been killed in the Middle East and left her with 3 little children. He was wounded at Dunkirk, came home and then went to the Middle East and she had a little baby girl on the day he was supposed to have been killed. I hope you receive this letter and thank you once again. I am sorry I did not find the letter sooner so I am sending by air mails so that you will get it quicker and if you care to correspond with use I will be please to do so or if there is a Canadian Tommy you know of over here I would like to show my appreciation by getting in touch with him and doing something in return if I can possibly do so.
Thanking you once again & hoping to hear from you soon.
Yours Gratefully, Maude Johnstone
This letter took my breath away. We have found reference to other notes and letters between makers and recipients, but finding one that has survived is very rare. It is so full of information about the recipient’s life in wartime; Maude Johnstone – her children, her husband, her brother, her sister and sister’s husband and children – their hardships, their worries, her gratitude, her willingness to do anything she could to return her thanks for the quilt. Her hope that Beulah would write back.
And for Beulah – we don’t know if she ever wrote back to Maude, but the fact that she kept the letter for her whole life tells of the meaning it held for her. Imagine the excitement of receiving a letter from England, taking the letter to her quilting circle and reading it aloud. Imagine how it would have encouraged the women around her that day to stitching a bit faster, a bit more carefully, with greater determination, because the work that they were doing had been seen, known, appreciated, from far away…
I found Beulah mentioned in a few articles in newspapers.com. In the Brantford (Ontario) Expositor, dated November 15, 1941, there is mention of Beulah as a member of the Women’s Institute, just as her mother was. Beulah was born in 1917, married in 1945 and died in 1993. Dale said that Beulah’s mother quilted, and her grandmother too, and now also her daughter Dale. So as I have found so often, the tradition of quilting is trans-generational in so many families.
Thank you Beulah for your wartime work, for stitching your name onto this quilt, for saving Maude’s letter, for teaching your daughter to quilt, and thank you Dale for saving this letter as well and for reaching out to share it with the world as we seek to gather stories about the textile work of women in wartime.
And what about Maude? Would any of our followers like to help us find out more about her? Did her family survive? Her brother? Their home address? We would love to know more about her if we can. Maude Johnstone, 51 Forsyth Road, S.E. 17, London, England.
