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- [00:21]
A
Sometimes the textiles that have the power to move us. Most are not sumptuous silks or exquisite embroideries, but instead quite ordinary, humble things. They touch us because they hold immense meaning despite the years that separate us. For more than 200 years, London's foundling Hospital collected the details of every one of the thousands of children, and it accepted through its doors. Alongside the official record of what the child was wearing are any notes that the mother left with her infant. And often a scrap of cloth or ribbon is pinned there, too. That snippet was a vital identifying token. The idea was that if the mother's circumstances changed, she could return to the foundling hospital with her half of the cloth, match the two pieces and reclaim her child. Seeing the billet books with the tokens they contain is an intensely moving experience. Each page is its own story that has a capacity to raise strong emotions, especially if, like Pippi Longstocking, Harry Potter, Snow White, James Bond, Huckleberry Finn, or Scarlett o', Hara, you too are a foundling, fostered or adopted. Welcome to Haptic and Hughes Tales of Textiles. My name is Jo Andrews and I'm a hand weaver interested in what cloth, in all its forms, tells us about ourselves as human beings. Textiles have an incredible power to talk to us if we can hear them. They comfort and console us, create memories and define who we are. And nowhere more than in this episode, in which the secret of your origins might hang on a scrap of cloth. This episode is about the billet books and what they tell us about how poor and middle class women in the 1700s dressed themselves and their children. But it is also about personal family stories. After Haptic and Hugh first published an episode about the foundling hospital nearly four years ago, we were contacted by sue, who told us she had discovered that her several times great grandmother had been a foundling at the London hospital. What sue didn't know and hoped we could help with was the original billet record. Were there any details about where the baby had come from? And was there possibly a fabric token on her page? The record was matched, and it did reveal the original identity of Sue's ancestor and the place where she was christened. Sadly, there was no little scrap of cloth there, but it did tell us that this tiny child had arrived at the foundling hospital in the first few weeks of her life in the spring of 1758. Unlike so many others, we know that she survived to live a long and full life, dying at the age of 87, which was an incredible feat for those days. Sue is Writing a book about her many times great grandmother. And for more details, we are all going to have to wait until it is published. But sue and her family owe their existence to the foundling hospital, which was set up thanks to the efforts of a determined sea captain. London in the mid-1700s was a successful and rich city. But not all its citizens shared in that wealth. Grinding poverty, sickness and violence stalked many of its inhabitants, especially women and children. And this, above all, is a story of these working class women and their babies. It's also a tale of how textiles gather meaning. As time passes, what begins life as something quite mundane down the years can acquire layers of significance and be transformed into something powerful and extraordinary. But we start with our sea captain, who returned to London from North America and was appalled.
- [05:36]
B
Well, the key to the founding hospitals being established is a man called Thomas Coram, who was a ship's master, a merchant, a shipbuilder, English. But he worked in the early 18th century in Massachusetts for many years. And when he came back to London in the 1720s, he was horrified to see children abandoned in the streets, and he was determined to set up an institution to house them. But it took him a long time. It took him the best part of 20 years.
- [06:13]
A
That's John Stiles, emeritus professor of history and a specialist in the textiles of this period. Thomas Coram was a man on a mission who simply wouldn't take no for an answer. He assembled something many of us might recognize today, A committee of the great and the good, or at least their wives. And painstakingly, bit by bit, he raised the private money he needed to build his hospital, London's first orphanage, which opened its doors in 1739. In this, London was way behind other European cities, where convents and nuns had long taken in orphans. But Coram convinced artists like Hogarth to exhibit his paintings for the hospital and eminent composers like Handel to create music to raise money for his project. Coram's Foundling hospital was a grand establishment in what were then open fields on the outskirts of the city. Immediately it had problems. How to select the limited number of children it could afford to take, how to keep raising money to support them, and how to guarantee anonymity to the mothers so that they could bring their babies to the hospital without being identified.
- [07:50]
B
The whole system was anonymous. They were very, very worried that if the mother's name was known, this would be a source of shame, because often some, but not all of the children were illegitimate, and that abandoning a child was regarded as shameful so that mothers might and Especially mothers who are rejected might feel so ashamed that they killed themselves, killed the baby. Very bad consequences would stem. And this, in fact, was not just the policy in London, it was the policy of all these foundling hospitals across continental Europe as well. They all worked on this anonymous system.
- [08:27]
A
And so the foundling hospital had to find an anonymous way of registering each baby, but one that allowed them to be certain that which child was which.
- [08:39]
B
Because the other rule which all these hospitals across various parts of Europe followed was the idea that if the mother's circumstances changed, she could take the child back. I mean, there's a very, very strong belief in 18th century European culture, Christian European culture, both Protestant and Catholic, that in maternalism, that children should be looked after by their mothers. And so that in all these hospitals was a high priority. So you've got an anonymous handing over of the child at the start of the process, but you also have a belief that the mother should be able to reclaim the child if her circumstances change. How can those be reconciled? How do you know whether the mother who reclaims the child is the mother of the child being reclaimed? And that's where the so called billet system came in. The billet was essentially a registration document for each child.
- [09:37]
A
And although the billet didn't contain the mother's name, it recorded a lot of useful information.
- [09:45]
B
It had all sorts of details about the child registered on it, in particular how old it was when brought its sex, obviously lots of details about the child's clothing when it came into the hospital. Because although the hospital reclothed all the babies as they were brought in. And remember, we're talking very often about tiny, tiny babies, one day, two day, three day old babies. So they had a list of all the baby's clothing that it had worn, and then they had any details of any particular features of the child, whether they had a mole here on their face or some other characteristic. So that gave a basic document which identified what the child.
- [10:29]
A
The foundling hospital also encouraged each mother to bring in a token to attach to the billet something only she knew about and she could describe and produce the other half of if she came back to collect her child. It's hard for us to stand in the shoes of these women in the past who faced this choice. Not all of these children were illegitimate by any means. Many of them had two married parents, but parents who just couldn't feed them or afford to keep them. What would you have chosen as your token as you handed over a child that you couldn't keep a baby that was probably just a few days old. Most of the women would have been illiterate. To bring a letter would have been difficult. So they often brought what they had to hand, which were the textiles they used every day. Snippets from their dresses, a length of coloured ribbon, a fragment of a bright printed scarf or a little silk cockade
- [11:38]
B
or rosette for a token. You needed a textile that was going to be retrospectively recognizable, that a mother five years, six years later was going to be able to come back and say, this is my textile. Of course, textiles had one other advantage in this respect, which is that you could unlikely a letter, you could cut them in half. So you could take a length of ribbon and cut it in half and you'd leave one half, maybe a foot, you know, six inches of ribbon with the hospital, who then pinned it to the billet, to the registration document, and you would take away the other half, which you could then keep as your evidence that you had left that child on that date with the hospital. So textiles had an advantage over letters and text and paper. And actually, I think, interestingly, very often in the 18th century, that was a very widely held view. Paper, paper is easily lost, easily burnt, easily wetted. 18th century homes weren't exactly weather first a lot of the time. So paper is vulnerable in a way textile, textiles were not vulnerable. Textiles will survive a lot of bending, folding, ripping experiences that paper would suffer with, and to do it with textiles made a lot of sense for both the hospital and the women concerned.
- [13:09]
A
These billets were all collected and carefully kept, and later, in Victorian times, they were bound into books called the billet books. Each page in these volumes represents an extraordinary time in the life of the child and its mother, the moment at which they were separated. And the textiles that are still pinned to the pages over 250 years later are all that connect them together. The little pieces of fabric are the last gift each mother gave her child, and also a record of the parting between the two. I find the pages emotional reading, although we cannot know the circumstances in which each child was given up. Here are some entries. Foundling Hospital, June 30, 1753, number 1109. A male child, about a fortnight old, and with him as his token, a tiny hand woven baby's cap in linen fringed with lace. Foundling Hospital, November 1, 1758. Female child christened with several marks in the face and a handwritten note attached to that reads, elizabeth Brown, born on Sunday 29th of October, between 1 and 2 in the afternoon, 1758. Pray take great care of this child. And below is pinned a beautiful silk ribbon with a deep plum centre and pink squares down the side. Foundling Hospital, December 6, 1759. Number 14695. A male child about 14 days old, who came with part of a colourful hand embroidered sampler as his token. And finally, there is a baby girl whose token was a cutout red woolen heart pinned to a small piece of her linen baby cap and a ribbon of blue silk underneath.
- [15:33]
B
The typical token that was left with the babies was a piece of textile, if it was not a letter. So the physical token is a piece of textile. And three types of textiles stand out. First is ribbons, which tended to be colorful but cheap. You could buy a length of ribbon and a yard of ribbon for two pennies, three pennies. And they were silk, cheap waste silk very often, but nevertheless silk and silk dyes. Well, so they were very brightly coloured. The second group was is Czech fabrics, which were very, very widely worn among working women at the time, especially for aprons, for neckcloths and so on. So they were used for accessorizing in one way or another. And of course, checks were made in. They're mainly blue and white, which was the fashion at the time. But they came in many different sizes of check, combinations of lines and so on. So presumably these people could recognize them retrospectively. And then the third group is printed fabrics. And these are printed principally either on linen or on linen cotton fabrics, in other words, fabrics with a linen warp and a cotton weft. And these were the product of the print works around London, which were using the technology of colorfast printing, which had been introduced from India in the late 17th, early 18th century. It was a pretty new technology for Britain and Europe that they were using.
- [17:16]
A
Looking through the billet books and the tokens, one of the things that astonishes me is, is that these fabrics come from a time before mechanized spinning and weaving. Every square inch of fabric in the billet books was hand spun, hand dyed and hand woven. Each one would have taken a great deal of time to rest, from raw material to finished garment. This was a process that many people were involved in and it gave them an understanding and a knowledge that we have lost. We have evidence of this because for a short time, Parliament worried about a lack of manpower during a new war with France, ordered the foundling hospital to take every child that arrived at its gates. And it underwrote the cost. The result was that, briefly, thousands of children were admitted. Over four years, they took in 4,15,000 children.
- [18:20]
B
So you know, the staff were overwhelmed. So what did they do? Well, my guess is that you came into a room. There was a clerk probably at a high desk, with a quill pen and an inkwell because. And he wrote out the form. And the baby would be held by the nurse, by the female nurse who would be calling out the textiles items of which the clothing was made. And you can see these lists. And they say, you know, that this is made from linen, this is made from cotton. I've got one here which goes, you know, the cap, this is from 1759, right in the middle of the war. And it says the cap is made from Holland, which is a kind of linen with a cambric border. Either very fancy, expensive fine linen border, a forehead cloth, which is lawn and other fine linen. The gown is sprigged linen and with red sprigs. A blanket which was a yard of blanketing, so called roller, which was something the baby was rolled up in. She has a calico waistcoat, a linen shirt and a piece of rug as what we in England called a nappy and what in the America is called the diaper. And what's clear is these nurses really know their textiles, because I've done an analysis of all the printed fabrics for certain years to look at whether the staff of the hospital got the difference between a print on a linen fabric, all linen, and a print on a cotton linen fabric, a mixture of cotton linen. 95% of the time they get it right. And I can only get it right by using a microscope. But they didn't have a microscope, so they were good. They really knew their textile. They had a kind of what I've called a material literacy, which we don't really have in the same way.
- [20:21]
A
Now, John says that some of the most moving tokens are those where the mother has customized part of a printed pattern.
- [20:29]
B
So what mothers would do sometimes, especially mothers who had a very powerful investment in their children's future, they'd cut out one of these little elements in the design which held some sort of symbolic significance. So you find little bits of fabric with a bud cut out, a bud design cut out, or a butterfly design cut out, or an acorn for growth and flourishing. You know, they're all designed. These are designs which symbolize something for the mother. And that's what they use as a token.
- [21:04]
A
Children who were admitted to the foundling hospital had their billet written out. They were reclothed. And as soon as that had happened, they were shipped out to the countryside to wet nurses who were specifically employed by the hospital for that purpose. The other thing that happened was that each child was given the. A new identity, a new name. But one of the interesting things about the billet books is that in a number of entries, the mothers try to insist that the child keeps its birth name.
- [21:39]
B
I mean, it must have been a risky thing to do for a mother, because if you imagine you're in a terrible situation, you're destitute, you want your child to be taken in. You know, the policy of the hospital is to rename the baby. The hospital doesn't want your name. And yet you're. So, you do have this bond with the child. And so you get these ribbons and these pieces of textile with embroidery, all with these statements like my name is Andrews. And I think that is. That to me is very powerful. I mean, we know from modern welfare institutions and from the history of welfare institutions that the people who receive welfare are not powerless. They get very quickly to know the system. And that's one of the reasons why the people who run these systems often fret so much about malingering and exploitation and dishonesty, often unjustifiable. It does mean that you can't always believe from when you see a piece of textile on one of these registration documents, these billets, that that looks like a bird flying free or an acorn that would grow. Whether it's. Is that what the mother really thought, she's dumping her baby on an institution? Or was it what they thought the hospital would want, that the hospital would look more favorably on them and their baby if they performed or presented themselves as, you know, deeply concerned with the baby's welfare, that that's what the hospital would expect and that would encourage it to take. So there was, there's always this sense, was the hospital being played? I mean, I think pretty rarely, actually, but that was. That's always a concern. If you're looking at these things and trying to interpret them, when we know nothing about the actual mother herself or anything, it's. It's hard. But when the mother, you know, gives a ribbon with her name on when she knows that's exactly what the hospital doesn't want, you have this sense this mother really, you know, has something, has a bond with this baby that she may be giving it up, but it, you know, it's. That's still the bond. And that must have been a heart wrenching decision for the mother.
- [24:02]
A
The foundling hospital did its best by these children. But in the 1750s, half of all babies in Britain died in their first year. Of life. On top of that, the babies that came to the foundling hospital were from deeply disadvantaged backgrounds. Two thirds of them died, which is hard for us to comprehend. But there are some bright stories in the Some of the children, just a handful of the thousands that were handed over were reclaimed. There's a beautiful patchwork needle case made of many highly coloured woven and printed fabrics. It was the token given in with foundling number 16516, a male admitted on February 11, 1767. He was given the name Benjamin Twirl by the hospital. His mother, Sarah Bender, who had christened him Charles, reclaimed him when he was 8 in June 1775. These are tremendously compelling stories, but over the years, both the lives of the mothers and the children have disappeared in the candlelight of history. And what we are left with are the billet books and their fabrics, which give us, nearly 300 years later, a way to peer into the past and to understand a little more about how these women live their lives. We're on a windy street in London, in front of an anonymous 1930s building. It doesn't look like much, but it's one of the city's great treasure houses, home to over a thousand years of its history, stored in 70 miles of archives. This is the London Metropolitan Archives. I lived in London for many years and I had no idea it was there, but it's an incredible place. And this is where the billet books now live. They still belong to Coram, which today is no longer an orphanage, but a charity working for better chances for children. Caroline de Stefani is the conservation studio manager at the archives and she's responsible for conserving the billet books.
- [26:42]
C
They are in various states, I mean, considering that they are textiles. And as you know, textiles are very light sensitive and obviously when they have been added to the leather, they were not clean at the time. The quality of the material was probably not the best. I mean, we're not talking about velvet or very expensive textiles. So they already were attached and not in a perfect condition, unfortunately. Obviously, because it's organic material, they do degrade naturally. And because they also bound in volumes, some textiles, they have been folded several times. They have been pinned with pins and needles on the paper, and that also doesn't really help the textile and the paper. The textile, while degrading, has also stained the pages, which are now discoloured, and you can see the shape they have left on the paper. So overall, they are quite vulnerable and fragile. And this is the reason why usually the billet books have Restricted access because they're also difficult to handle.
- [27:57]
A
Caroline's focus is to ensure that the billet books, the textiles, the tokens and the notes they contain don't deteriorate any further.
- [28:07]
C
They are kept in strong rooms where they temperature is low and the relative humidity is also relatively low. And they are kept in an environment that is stable, which is very important for textile and paper and books in general. You sort of delay the natural degradation of organic material. Another way that we make sure that we minimize the damage is providing good packaging. So every single light, every single book has bespoke box, and the boxes are kept in other boxes. They are made of archival grade materials, so it's buffered. And then obviously we do intervention, let's say proper conservation, which means if there are tears on the pages, if the textile is particularly dirty, we do dry clean it.
- [28:57]
A
At the moment, Caroline is preparing three billet books for display at the Foundling Museum, which tells the story of the hospital.
- [29:06]
C
They have been selected for the next display that will be open in April, and it's an introductory gallery at the Foundling Museum. So these three billet books, they are, as we see them, they are on bookstands because they're very important that they are supported when they are open. And what we see here is random opening of the three books. One has a pink silk ribbon, I think, and the silk ribbon is attached to a piece of paper with two red wok seals. And the ribbon is a little bit crumbled, so we need to work a little bit on making sure that it's secure while it's on display.
- [29:55]
A
We.
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C
We see needles because this textile has been attached to the document with a needle. There are tears along the page, so we need to sort that out as well before it's going on display.
- [30:09]
B
This.
- [30:10]
C
It's a little bit difficult to identify, but there is. So we've got an opening page. It's quite soiled, it's very dirty, and it's quite degraded as well. So the pin is rusting. And the degradation products from the textile was transferred to the next page. So you see a discoloration on the other side of the page. And this is also a problem that you find quite a lot on these billet books. The tokens and the textiles, they are coming in various colors, patterns. They are printed, embroidered. This one has. It's folded, unfortunately. Is that a leaf printed?
- [31:03]
A
Yes, it's a beautiful printed leaf with dots in the background.
- [31:08]
C
Yeah. So it's very fascinating to see all the patterns.
- [31:14]
A
John Stiles became interested in the billet books, because he was writing about what ordinary people Wore in the 1700s, but it was tough to find information about them.
- [31:27]
B
I was working in a museum, Victoria and Albert Museum at the time, and I was, and I was surrounded by the clothes that had been worn by very rich people in 18th century England. But none of the clothes worn by poor people survived. I mean, they do survive, but they survive in the British Library because all the linens were converted into paper, because paper was then all made from linen rags. But that wasn't a help to me.
- [31:54]
A
But the billet books were a gold mine for him. The only large collection of clothing samples worn by poor people that survives from that period. It pointed him to a number of interesting things. The first was that most babies in poor families wore garments cut down from women's clothing. There were very few purpose made baby clothes. The second was more surprising. It was that even very poor women in this era could follow fashion.
- [32:29]
B
So it alerted me to the fact that these, these women were able to have these very fashionable garments or very fashionable fabrics in their cheaper varieties, coarser, less colors. I mean, the cost of a printed cotton or linen turned basically on two things. First of all, how fine the fabric was, its fabric weight, and secondly, on how many colors the price went up for each color you added. So two color was a lot cheaper than a five color. And indeed, in the commercial correspondence, that's how they describe it. A five color sunset, A six color sunset. And as we know, that the designs on these fabrics often followed the broad trend of fashion in fine silks. I mean, the fine silks worn by dark duchesses and miladies and the royal court set the fashion. And that was true all over Europe, principally at Lyon. But Spitalfields was a near competitor. Those set the fashion, but you could reproduce at least some of the look of those silks with print blocks very much more cheaply on cotton and linen.
- [33:50]
A
And if you want to know more about silk making in Spitalfields and Lyon, there are Haptic and Hugh podcasts on both. These were, of course, centres of production for the elite. And what we have in the billet books is very much the fabric of the poor. But they tell us that by the mid-1700s, cheap printed cottons were being turned out in large amounts and in patterns that could be quickly updated according to fashion, and that they were being produced much closer to home than previously thought.
- [34:26]
B
This demonstrated to me that by the 1750s, very poor women could have access to these printed fabrics. But it also alerted me to the Fact that they were not getting that access with imports from India. The calico craze of the 17th century is often said to have tried transformed what women wore in Europe. Not true. What they're wearing are fabrics that use the Indian technique of fast color printing. But it's fast color printing that's done on European fabrics in the area around London by print works in London, which have hijacked the technique.
- [35:10]
A
So the key elements of a system of fashion for all, all women, whatever their status, seems to have come into being much earlier than we thought.
- [35:20]
B
There isn't a kind of class split between the clothes that poor people wear and the clothes that rich people wear. Essentially the look, the basic look of women's clothing is shared, that they all wear, you know, some sort of combination of a gown and a petticoat. And that's true of very poor women and it's true of very rich women. Now the poor women may strip the gown off and just work in their shift and petticoat when they're washing or whatever, but still they all, virtually all have gowns and they often have a workaday gown. And that's why by the later 18th century you get the idea of the so called stuff gown. The cheap worsted gown is the typical working woman's workwear. But then for the weekends, for Sundays and for holidays, high days and holy days, as they say, these women will have something that's much more fashionable and coloured and very often it's one of these printed fabrics. The founding hospital collection of tokens actually tells us a lot about women's fashion and especially about the trickle down character of poor women's fashionability in the mid 18th century.
- [36:34]
A
The billet books have lots of tales to tell us, but at the end of the day it's the mothers and their babies that draws Caroline de Stefani.
- [36:45]
C
It's really moving. And yeah, you didn't think that someone would put all this effort to make sure that some children would survive. We have to see the positive. Many children, they were not claimed back, but they at least had a future.
- [37:05]
A
And for John Stiles, the historian, it's the sheer diversity of what the billet books can show us that fascinates him.
- [37:14]
B
They have many, many different meanings, they're relevant to many, many different debates and issues and that's the joy of them. But on the other hand, one can easily kind of slightly forget their original position. Sooner or later you always come back to this sense, to that very visceral physical realization that these things represent a child, a child who given two thirds of them died very quickly, probably died. And that child also that was separated from its mother and the tragedy of that comes back even when you've looked at.
- [38:01]
A
Thank you for listening. If you'd like to find out more about the modern day Foundling Museum where you can see the billet books and discover more about the hospital, or if you would like to see pictures, links to background reading for this episode or read a transcript script of this podcast, you will find these resources at www.hapticandhue.com listen. Haptic and Hu is hosted by me, Jo Andrews. It's edited and produced by Bill Taylor and sound edited by Charles Lomas of Darkroom Productions. It's an independent podcast free of ads and sponsorship, supported entirely by its listeners who generously fund us through Buy Me a Coffee or by becoming a friend of Haptic and Hugh in this month's Travels with Textiles on Friends, which goes out in two weeks time, we'll be hearing from Eleanor Houghton on how Charlotte Bronte's clothes change our view of who this famous Victorian author really was.
- [39:18]
C
We don't really have anything that's as close to us as clothing in so many ways. It tells us about attitudes and values and beliefs and religion, financial circumstances. There's so many layers to it. We really have this connection with the wider world than which she lived. And I think one of the challenges we've had with Charlotte is that we've made her someone who seems this sort of lonely figure on the moor. There's something about the clothing and that very immediate tangible evidence and that really deeply connects her that forces us to really look at that again.
- [39:53]
A
To find out more about Friends and to have a chance of winning the textile gifts we give away with every episode, go to www.hapticandhue.com join. But until next time, it's goodbye from me and enjoy whatever you are. Sam.